Integration of renewable energy and socioeconomic development for environmental sustainability in Africa: An empirical analysis.

As Africa grapples with the challenges of energy access, economic growth, urbanization and industrialization, as well as the environmental degradation, the adoption of renewable energy technologies emerges as a promising solution. Therefore, this article examines the effects of socioeconomic growth and renewable energy integration on environmental sustainability in 32 African countries using the auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, nonlinear ARDL (NARDL) model, and Dumitrescu and Hurlin causality. The findings demonstrate that urbanization, industrialization, and economic growth all contribute to environmental deterioration. The ARDL model estimation shows that for every 1% increase in economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization, there will be a 1% rise in CO ₂ , respectively. Similarly, the results indicate that an additional 1% in economic growth and industrialization is expected to result in a 0.14% and 0.02% increase in ecological footprint, respectively. The NARDL model shows that industrialization significantly contribute into the CO ₂ increase, while renewable energy consumption decreases ecological footprint. Moreover, the causality test revealed the bidirectional causality between industrialization and CO ₂ , and urbanization and ecological footprint. Renewable energy consumption in both models showed the potential to enhance environmental quality, underscoring the significance of integrating renewable energy with socioeconomic development to support sustainable development.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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