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Health Effect of Pollution: Focus on Plastic and Greenhouse Gas Emission in Nigeria
Summary
A new study looking at 35 years of data in Nigeria found that plastic waste and greenhouse gas pollution both drag down human development — a combined measure of health, education, and income — with plastic pollution having the bigger negative impact of the two. This matters because it shows plastic waste isn't just an environmental eyesore; it's linked to real setbacks in how healthy, educated, and financially stable a population can be, reinforcing the need for better recycling systems and stronger enforcement of pollution laws.
This study examined the impact of plastic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions on human development index (HDI) in Nigeria. Environmental pollution, particularly from plastic waste and greenhouse gases, poses significant threats to public health, yet limited research has focused on how these pollutants jointly affect human welfare outcomes such as health, education, and income. The study employed annual time series data from 1990 to 2025 sourced from the World Bank, the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), and MDPI. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach was applied to accommodate the mixed order of integration among the variables, with the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test revealing that HDI and plastic leakage were stationary at first difference I(1), while greenhouse gas emissions were stationary at level I(0). The bounds test confirmed a long-run equilibrium relationship among the three variables at the 1% significance level. The parsimonious ARDL error correction model results showed that in the short run, lagged HDI exerted a positive significant effect, while greenhouse gas emissions and lagged plastic leakage exerted negative significant effects on HDI. In the long run, both greenhouse gas emissions and plastic leakage were negative and statistically significant determinants of HDI, with plastic leakage having a substantially larger detrimental impact. The error correction term of -0.387 indicated that approximately 38.7% of deviations from long-run equilibrium are corrected within one period. The study concludes that plastic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions significantly reduce human development in Nigeria, and recommends strengthening recycling infrastructure, enforcing existing environmental laws, and adopting long-term pollution reduction strategies.