Explaining the Reactions of Carbon Footprints to Energy and Mineral Depletions: New Insights from Fourier-Bootstrap ARDL

An in-depth understanding of the factors that enhance carbon footprints is a plausible pathway to enthrone environmental sustainability. Currently, the implications of energy and mineral depletion for carbon footprints in South Africa and Nigeria have received minimal empirical attention. The few available studies are non-exhaustive, often limiting broad-based policy refinements. With datasets spanning more than five decades (1971–2022), the novel Fourier Bootstrap Autoregressive Distributed Lag estimator was selected to account for structural breaks and nonlinearities. The empirical findings reveal divergent environmental pathways: South Africa’s carbon footprint (0.666% increase) is more related to energy depletion, reflecting coal-dominated electricity generation. Mineral depletion emerges as the primary culprit in Nigeria (10.856% increase), attributable to unregulated mining activities, including gas flaring and deforestation. Both countries face common challenges from urbanization (0.094% and 0.087% increases) and economic growth (0.107% and 0.046% increases). Trade openness shows insignificant effects. Short-run carbon footprint reductions from resource depletion improvements do not persist, underscoring the need for policy consistency. Policy effectiveness analysis identifies coal phase-out (0.9) and carbon pricing (0.8) as South Africa’s highest-return interventions. Mining regulation (0.9), green mining (0.9), and artisanal formalization (0.9) emerge as Nigeria’s priorities. The integration frameworks outperform siloed approaches. This implies South Africa may capture higher returns from policy coherence, while Nigeria may depend more on enforcement capacity. These findings provide evidence-based guidance for context-specific environmental policy design in resource-dependent economies.