Assessing Ghana's carbon dioxide emissions through energy consumption structure towards a sustainable development path

Abstract

Abstract The CO2 emission that accompanies significant consumption of energy raises concern as for whether economies that require such path like Ghana can also achieve sustainable economic development. In this paper, the driving factors of energy-related CO2 emissions and its future trend for Ghana is studied using a time series data spanning from 1980 to 2016 in an Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model with Extended Kaya Identity framework. First Kaya identity was adopted and extended to decomposed CO2 emission driving factors into carbon intensity, energy intensity, economic activity, and substitution effect. The estimates were further used to forecast CO2 emissions through to 2030. The results indicate the major driver for historical CO2 emissions increase in Ghana has been the transition from biomass to petroleum fuel consumption. This is followed by the energy intensity of economic output, carbon intensity changes and overall economic activity. Carbon-free energy consumption currently does not lead to a reduction of CO2 in Ghana. The forecasting results show the current trend of energy consumption and economic development path have the potential for CO2 emissions reduction. Some targeted policy suggestions in relation to the estimate results are also provided.