The issue of climate risk is a global concern as it has posed telling consequences on welfare and threatened the survival of humanity altogether. This study seeks to investigate the extent to which climate risk has impacted agricultural sustainability in Nigeria in order to underscore the immediate and impending food crises that the country would face in the future. More so, it is to serve as the policy document for the government to direct the needed resources and to orient agribusiness stakeholders toward agricultural sustainability, in the face of increasing climate challenges.
Predicated on an extended Ricardian model, both agricultural value addition and agricultural productivity index were deployed as measures of agricultural sustainability, while climate risk factors are the sea level and temperature. The technique of analysis employed is the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model, meant to analyze both the long-run and short-run impacts.
Sequel to various preliminary tests, the estimated results showed that climatic factors, such as the sea level and temperature, significantly negatively impact agricultural sustainability in Nigeria, especially in the short-run situation. In the long run, the results are measures-sensitive. Additional results found that the gross national income per capita and fertilizer consumption have a significantly positive impact on agricultural sustainability in Nigeria.
To elicit more insightful findings and obtain more far-reaching conclusions, a more robust data scope with high-frequency data would be required. More so, data coverage on more components of climatic conditions, such as rainfall, sunshine would provide additional robust results.
Efforts should be made to improve the economic welfare of the people, especially farmers, traders and other stakeholders who deals in agribusiness. This can be in form of educating farmers on the need to prioritize their health and wellbeing.
The Ricardian model has been reputed for analyzing studies on land and agriculture, and their combined effects on livelihood and productivity. This study pioneered an extended Ricardian-type model to quantitatively investigate the impact of climate change on agricultural sustainability.
