Effect Of Climate Change On Economic Growth In Africa

The majority of African nations environments are largely influenced by the dynamics of climate change.Agriculture,mining,forestry,energy,tourism,coastal resources,and other important industries that fuel the continent’s economic expansion are particularly vulnerable to climate change.The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of climate change on economic growth in Africa using panel data from 1995-2018 employing the panel autoregressive distributed lag(ARDL)to analyze this study in hand and perform the regional analysis.Panel co-integration test was used to estimate how climate change affects the economic growth of Africa.We also performed the panel unit-root test to ascertain that none of the variables are integrated of order two I(2).Moreover,granger causality test has also been performed to show unidectional causality.Evidence from cointegration analysis shows there exist a long-run co-integration among the variables.Findings indicate that carbon emissions and precipitation have a positive effect on economic growth both in the short-and long-run,but temperature negatively affect it.This means that carbon emissions and precipitation are critical inputs in stimulating economic growth but temperature is deleterious to economic performance.Furthermore,our Pooled Mean Group(PMG)regression analysis results revealed that West Africa is the region most affected by the effects of climate change.Therefore,policymakers should urge domestic and foreign industries emitting more greenhouse gases as well as gasoline vehicles users to switch to clean energy utilization.Besides,in West Africa,efforts should be made in setting new policies and strategies aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change on economic growth.