Renewable Energy and Ecological Sustainability in Africa: Does Foreign Debt and Financial Globalisation Matter?

Since the last decade, ecological preservation has become a critically debated topic in developing and developed nations. Hence, to ensure environmental sustainability, countries and international bodies have canvassed for measures that support severe restrictions to protect the Earth's biodiversity. This study's objectives were two-fold: the sole effect of renewable energy on ecological sustainability and second, identify the impacts of external debt and financial globalisation in the renewable energy-ecological sustainability nexus, both within the Environmental Kuznet Curve (EKC) framework for 44 African economies. Second-generation estimation techniques were employed and deduced inferences from the cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag method used in the study. The study empirically demonstrated that renewable energy is insignificant for ecological sustainability without debt stock and financial globalisation. However, the inclusion of both variables revealed that while renewable energy and financial globalisation accelerated ecological sustainability, external debt worsened it in the short and long-term periods. Therefore, the study proposed amongst others that for the productive benefits of renewable energy use to human and environmental well-being, policymakers must execute clean energy portfolios by restricting brown energy use. This measure will require considering introducing a significant amount of carbon tax or emission permit and incentivising businesses to adopt green technologies.