Abstract
Sustainable development is a development strategy that utilizes resources in a manner that ensures their availability for future generations. The study thus, investigates the impact of environmental quality (a component of socioeconomic living conditions) on sustainable development in Nigeria. The influence of biocapacity deficit per capita (measurement for environmental quality) and other macroeconomic variables on human development index (sustainable development’s measurement) is examined using data which range from1999q1 to 2022q2. Having utilized the Autoregressive Distributed Lag framework to evaluate the short-term and the long-term equations, the result reveals that, apart from real per capita gross domestic product and capital investment, which are significant in the short run, biocapacity deficit per capita, urban population and labour force do not exhibit significant effects. However, in the long-run, biocapacity deficit per capita and labour force turned out negatively significant. Interestingly, biocapacity deficit per capita is observed to be sustainable development retarding. The key implication from the outcomes of this research is that the degraded environment retards long-term development sustainability in Nigeria. Therefore, the study recommends extensive reforestation and afforestation efforts to enhance the nation’s degraded lands, restore biodiversity, and boost carbon sequestration. However, despite the insightful findings, key macroeconomic variables like technological innovation and institutional quality that would have explained sustainable development were not factored into the study analysis.