Globalization, renewable energy consumption and sustainable development

Since the launch of the Brundtland Report in 1987, developing countries continue to face problematic trade-offs between balancing the current use of natural resources and how to minimize the level of harm to their future use. This paper examines how renewable energy consumption and globalization affect sustainable development for a sample of 24 sub-Saharan African countries (SSA) between 1990-2015. Nevertheless, the evidence from the panel ARDL/PMG estimation shows that renewable energy consumption stimulates sustainable development. However, the heterogeneous analysis between our variables reveals that renewable energy is likely to exert a greater impact on countries that have made modest progress in sustainable development agenda, these countries still need to significantly reduce the consumption of non-renewable energy sources in their total energy mix. We further observe that the integration of global economies and society is relevant for sustainable development. Therefore, since SSA countries have a huge potential for renewable energy including solar power, wind, hydropower, biomass, and geothermal energy, global partnerships in the areas of green policy innovation and research are critical. More importantly, the green partnerships should aim at facilitating unfettered access to clean energy by ensuring that the use of renewables is less expensive than fossil-based energy sources. This is likely to smoothen the path to achieving sustainable development goals in SSA.