Towards environmental sustainability path in Africa: The critical role of ICT, renewable energy sources, agriculturalization, industrialization and institutional quality

Abstract

As African countries battles to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 13 (that is, climate change mitigation), there is an increasing need to harness information and communication technology (ICT), renewable energy sources, agriculturalization, industrialization and institutional quality toward achieving this goal. Hence, it has become critical to investigate the potential role that ICT, renewable energy sources, agriculturalization, industrialization and institutional quality could play towards environmental sustainability path in Africa. The study spans from 2000 to 2021 and applied a battery of novel econometric techniques. The variables were found to have a long-term equilibrium relationship, and the causality results indicate that there is a two-way/mutual causality between all of the series (except between ICT and CO2 emissions). Based on the system GMM results, this study recommends that African governments and policymakers can achieve environmental sustainability faster when ICT is jointly utilised with the renewable energy sources and trade openness compared to the levels of industrialization, agriculturalization and institutional quality.