Nexus between CO2 emissions, renewable energy consumption, militarisation, and economic growth in South Africa: Evidence from using novel dynamic ARDL simulations

Abstract

The South African government battles with global warming issues while attempting to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals −7&13 (that is, affordable clean energy and climate change mitigation). To the best of our knowledge, no studies have focused exclusively on this research topic, and it is on this basis that in this article, the novel dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) simulations approach was employed for the purpose of estimating, simulating and plotting to investigate the CO2 emissions-renewable energy consumption-militarisation-economic growth nexus in South Africa (SA). The study spans between 1960 and 2019 and applies frequency domain causality. The main findings suggest that: (i) there is a long-run equilibrium relationship between the variables; (ii) the causality results differ; (iii) the treadmill theory of destruction and the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis hold in SA. Overall, this study recommends a synergy between defence, renewable energy, growth and environmental policies in both the short- and long-run for the purpose of promoting and maintaining environmental quality in SA.