Greening human capital towards environmental quality in Ghana: Insight from the novel dynamic ARDL simulation approach

Abstract

Numerous studies on the factors influencing Ghana's environmental quality have been undertaken. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has been conducted on the relationship between green human capital and environmental quality in Ghana. This study aims to address this knowledge gap by exploring the influence of green human capital on environmental quality in Ghana within the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework. Modern econometric techniques are employed for accurate and trustworthy analyses based on data collected from Ghana from 1990 to 2019. The results reveal that all the study variables are first differenced stationary and co-integrated in the long run. Therefore, the novel dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) simulation is adopted to examine the connections between the variables. The findings demonstrate that increasing green human capital degrades environmental quality in the short term while green human capital benefits environmental quality in the long term. Further, the investigation validates the EKC hypothesis in Ghana. It is recommended that stronger initiatives and policies be established to address the detrimental consequences of environmental deterioration caused by incompetent human capital, and that life-long green education be continuously reinforced so that human knowledge and skills keep updated with zero-emission milestones.