<p>Dealing with food and farming challenges to match the commitments on climate change continues to be a major issue for Ethiopia. So far, there are few empirical works investigating the way these dimensions interact—especially as time passes and situations become non-equal. The impact of food security and changes in agricultural production on the emission of carbon dioxide during 1990–2020 in Ethiopia is examined in this study. With a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model, both asymmetric relationships and how adjustments vary across different time slots are able to record. The analysis indicates that food security has a much smaller impact on emissions than agricultural output. Long-term, when food security is down by 1%, the emissions level climbs by 12.35% and if agriculture increases by 1%, emissions will also rise by 3.47%. What’s interesting is that negative agricultural shocks lead to stronger mitigation. If agriculture slows by 1%, the emissions drop by 5.18%. A fall in food security by 1% in the past year results in an increase in emissions by 9.70%. Just like before, raising current agricultural activity by 1% causes emissions to grow by 3.82%, although the lagged effects are not as significant. The results highlight that the connection between agriculture, food security and the environment varies over time and is unequal. Current measures should stress gigantic agriculture solutions that help farmers and the environment.</p> Graphical Abstract <p></p>