The Symmetric and Asymmetric Impact of Natural Resource Consumption and Carbon Emissions in Africa

This research aims to analyze the response of carbon emissions in the African continent to symmetric and asymmetric shocks on resource consumption, economic growth, urbanization, and energy consumption. Following the Shin et al. (2014) linear and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) methodology in panel form, we construct symmetric and asymmetric panel ARDL–PMG model to evaluate both short- and long-run impact of resource consumption on carbon dioxide emissions for a panel of 44 African countries over the period 2000 – 2019. The symmetric results show that despite natural resource consumption positively impacting carbon emission in both the long and short-run, the effect is not statistically significant. Energy consumption was found to affect environmental quality in the long-run and short-run adversely. Interestingly, economic growth was found to improve environmental quality in the long-run significantly, and no significant impact was reported in the case of urbanization. However, the asymmetric results prove that a positive and negative shock to natural resource consumption contributes significantly to carbon emission, contrary to the insignificant impact established in the linear framework. In terms of policy implications of the study, governments in Africa must preserve natural resources, use environmentally friendly and technologically advanced resource extraction methods, opt for green energy and also strictly apply environmental laws to promote environmental quality on the continent