Climate resilience assessment of sustainability at national level: A case study of sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Climate change is the most critical challenge to achieve sustainability, disrupting national economies and human lives, especially in vulnerable countries. However, there has been limited research assessing the “climate resilience of sustainability” — the capacity of national sustainability to withstand and recover from the impacts of climate change — over time and space. To bridge this gap, we quantify the climate resilient performance of sustainability (including social, economic, and environmental sub-resilient performance and comprehensive performance) in 37 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. We employed a coupling coordination degree model and panel regression to analyze the synergy between sub-dimensional resilience and explore the association between climate resilience of sustainability and other variables, respectively. Our findings indicate that while current development in most SSA countries lacks resilience, the score gap of climate resilience of sustainability between these countries is narrowing. On average, coastal countries exhibit lower performance in terms of the resilience of sustainability to climate change compared to inland countries. Moreover, the climate resilient performance among the three dimensions for all income groups reached an intermediate-coordinated state in 2018. However, most SSA countries exhibited an asymmetric level of sustainability and its climate resilience. Furthermore, we identified significant correlations between variables such as governance, gross domestic product, population, and precipitation with the climate resilience of sustainability. The insights from this study emphasize the need to prioritize climate resilience of sustainability and provide a reference for researchers and policymakers worldwide, to shape a long-term, prosperous, and resilient future under climate change.