An Impulse of Human Activities to Carbon Dioxide Gas Emissions in the Sub-Saharan Africa Region

Abstract

It is complicated to determine with exactitude the share of responsibility of the various sources of pollution for Africa. This intricacy emphasizes that pollution is not always considered a major risk for the continent. The existing data are still too few and often too imprecise to assess the extent of pollution on the continent. Sub-Saharan Africa is challenged by increasing pollution reinforced by a lack of politics and goodwill to formulate and implement good practices to deal with climate change issues. This paper highlight trends in carbon emissions due to agricultural land, energy use, agriculture-forestry and fisheries (value adds), real gross domestic product, and industry and construction based on their importance to the productive capacity of SSA. The output from the proposed study of causality between variables using the impulse response functions and the forecast error decomposition revealed this: the rise in agriculture/forestry, and fisheries, and energy use has positive shocks on CO₂ emissions. The carbon emissions growth in the SSA does not necessarily reckon on agricultural land, industry construction or manufactural construction, and real gross domestic product.

Keywords: Pollution, atmospheric pollutants, CO₂ emissions, climate change, policy

DOI: 10.7176/JESD/12-6-04

Publication date:March 31^st 2021