Heterogeneous and time varying nexus between climate change and quality of life in Africa

Climate change, one of the world's existential problems, has sparked widespread concern at national and multinational levels. In this study, we deviate from the existing scores of academic literature by investigating heterogenous and time-varying effects of climate change on quality of life at the continent and regional levels in Africa. Towards this end, we utilise carbon emissions and ecological footprint as our climate change variables and human development index to proxy quality of life for 31 African countries over the period 2000 to 2018. Several econometric techniques are then employed to account for cross-sectional dependence, panel unit root, long-term cointegration with structural break, and heterogeneous panel causality, whilst we also present results based on Bayesian panel VAR impulse response functions. The results indicate cross-sectional dependence due to spill-over effects from common factors in Africa, while the panel cointegration test affirms that climate change variables have long-term consequences for quality of life only in sub-Saharan African region. Moreover, our results reveal a uni-directional causality between climate change variables and quality of life at both the continent and sub-Saharan African region levels. However, the test shows a bi-directional causality between these variables in North Africa. This differential impacts of climate change variables on quality of life between Northern and sub-Saharan Africa suggests that policy initiatives toward mitigating the effects of climate crises should consider regional dynamics of the continent.