Environmental impacts of energy indicators on ecological footprints of oil-exporting African countries: Perspectives on fossil resources abundance amidst sustainable development quests

Abstract

In the wake of the ongoing debate on global energy dynamics and environmental concerns, the calls for collective action for environmental protection have intensified even as the quest for sustainable economic growth continues to shape the decisions of policymakers and authorities among nations. As such, this study examines the environmental impacts of energy indicators on the ecological footprint of mainly oil-exporting African economies from the perspective of the interaction between fossil energy resource rents and its consumption, while controlling for the roles of urbanization and globalization among the countries for the period between 1990 and 2016. The adopted Augmented Mean Group (AMG) estimator produced very insightful information in the study and offers the additional advantage of exploring country-specific outcomes in the empirical analyses that were subsequently corroborated by the Dynamic Ordinary Least Square (DOLS) and Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS) approaches. Firstly, fossil energy resource rents and their consumption significantly contribute to environmental deterioration through rising ecological footprint among the countries. Secondly, economic growth and globalization also aggravate the pressure exerted on the environment alongside the observed undesirable environmental impacts of rapid urbanization among the countries. Thirdly, the inverted U-shape income-footprint relationship depicting the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis was rejected for the panel of all countries, while minimal evidence of its validity was only upheld for Egypt and Nigeria on a country-specific basis, thereby reflecting the roles of individual country's specific differences. Hence, strategic energy transition plans, economic diversification policies, green technology investments, and improved environmental regulations were recommended as necessary ingredients for policy directions toward achieving environmental sustainability alongside relevant development goals (SDGs-8, 11, & 13) in the understudied economies.