Assessing the Environmental Sustainability Corridor in South Africa: The Role of Biomass Energy and Coal Energy

South Africa’s national development plan has outlined aspirations to achieve a sustainable environment. However, the country remains bound for an unsustainable trajectory. Despite this ecological issue, no studies have probed how biomass and coal energy impact ecological quality. In light of this gap, this study inspects the environmental effect of political risk, coal energy, and biomass energy in South Africa. Also, this study integrates economic growth and natural resources into its framework. This study uses the load capacity factor (LC), which is a more aggregate proxy of ecological quality due to its accounting for the demand and supply aspect of the environment. This study uses the dynamic autoregressive distributive lag estimator (ARDL), which is capable of not only providing details of the influence of each determinant on LC in the long and short term but also of capturing the counterfactual shock of positive or negative exogenous variables on the LC. The kernel regularized least squares (KRLS) method is used for a robustness analysis of the dynamic ARDL approach. Furthermore, the findings of the dynamic ARDL simulation estimator disclose the negative impact of economic growth on the LC, thereby contributing to environmental deterioration by 0.552%. Natural resources and coal energy have an adverse impact on the LC, indicating a reduction in environmental sustainability by 0.037% and 0.290%, respectively. Meanwhile, biomass contributes to the LC, thereby promoting ecological quality by 0.421%. Political risk contributes to the reduction in the LC. This research provides pertinent policy considerations for policymakers and governments in South Africa, suggesting that the government of South Africa should invest in biomass energy and sustainable extraction procedures since biomass energy has a vital role in increasing ecological quality.