Promoting environmental sustainability in Africa: the position of globalization, renewable energy, and economic growth

Mitigating carbon emissions has been a major concern for all nations. Various organizations have been campaigning and pushing the agenda of reducing carbon emissions for the past decades. Therefore, research on environmental sustainability is needed in taking decisions during policymaking. This study examines the effects of globalization, renewable energy, and economic growth on carbon emissions in ten large economies in Africa. Foreign direct investment and trade openness are the variables used to represent globalization in this study. The study deploys Cross-Sectional Autoregression Distributed Lag Model for analysis and further uses Nonlinear Autoregression Distributed Lag Model (NARDL) as robustness check. The results from the Cross-Sectional Autoregression Distributed Lag Model analysis indicate that renewable energy helps to mitigate carbon emissions in both short term and long term. Trade openness in the short term has no significant effect on carbon emissions but deteriorates the environment in the long term. Foreign direct investment in the short term mitigates carbon emissions but is insignificant in the long term, while economic growth has an insignificant effect on carbon emissions in both short and long term. The empirical results of the study recommend that renewable energy should be given the maximum attention and support to enhance its use in Africa. Foreign Direct Investment must serve as the basis for developing countries to cooperate with countries with high renewable technologies so as to help improve the use of renewable energy in developing countries.