Climate Variability, Energy-Related CO2 Emissions, and Cereal Yields in Romania and Serbia: An ARDL Analysis

This study examines the associations of land temperature anomalies and energy-related CO2 emissions per hectare with wheat and maize yields in Romania and Serbia during 1992–2023. Energy-related CO2 emissions per hectare are used as a scale-adjusted proxy for energy-use intensity and emissions associated with agricultural energy consumption, rather than as an indicator of climate intensity. The study contributes to the literature by applying a comparative ARDL framework to Romania and Serbia, two Central and Southeast European agricultural systems with different institutional contexts, integrating climate variability, nitrogen fertilizer use and energy-use-related emissions into a unified crop-specific analysis. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) framework, we estimate long-run equilibrium relationships and short-run dynamics between cereal yields and the selected explanatory variables. The results partially support the proposed hypotheses by indicating heterogeneous country- and crop-specific relationships. In Romania, nitrogen fertilizer use is positively associated with wheat and maize yields, while rising land temperature anomalies are negatively associated with maize productivity. In Serbia, energy-related CO2 emissions per hectare show a statistically significant negative long-run relationship with maize yields, whereas no statistically robust long-run relationships are identified for wheat. The findings highlight the importance of energy efficiency, input optimization and country-specific decarbonization strategies for sustainable cereal production.