The Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is far lag behind the sustainable targets that set out in the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which is highly needed to embark the priorities by their member countries to devise sustainable policies for accessing clean technologies, energy demand, finance, and food production to mitigate high-mass carbon emissions and conserve environmental agenda in the national policy agenda. The study evaluated United Nation's SDGs for environmental conservation and emission reduction in the panel of 35 selected SSA countries, during a period of 1995-2016. The study further analyzed the variable's relationship in inter-temporal forecasting framework for the next 10 years' time period, i.e., 2017-2026. The parameter estimates for the two models, i.e., CO2 model and PM2.5 models are analyzed by Generalized Method of Moment (GMM) estimator that handle possible endogeneity issue from the given models. The results rejected the inverted U-shaped Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) for CO2 emissions, while it supported for PM2.5 emissions with a turning point of US$5540 GDP per capita in constant 2010 US$. The results supported the "pollution haven hypothesis" for CO2 emissions, while this hypothesis is not verified for PM2.5 emissions. The major detrimental factors are technologies, FDI inflows, and food deficit that largely increase carbon emissions in a panel of SSA countries. The IPAT hypothesis is not verified in both the emissions; however, population density will largely influenced CO2 emissions in the next 10 years' time period. The PM2.5 emissions will largely be influenced by high per capita income, followed by trade openness, and technologies, over a time horizon. Thus, the United Nation's sustainable development agenda is highly influenced by socio-economic and environmental factors that need sound action plans by their member countries to coordinate and collaborate with each other and work for Africa's green growth agenda.
The objective of the study is to examine the impact of natural disasters on external migration, price level, poverty incidence, health expenditures, energy and environmental resources, water demand, financial development, and economic growth in a panel of selected Asian countries for a period of 2005-2017. The results confirm that natural disasters in the form of storm and flood largely increase migration, price level, and poverty incidence, which negatively influenced country's economic resources, including enlarge healthcare expenditures, high energy demand, and low economic growth. The study further presented the following results: i) natural resource depletion increases external migration, ii) FDI inflows increase price level, iii) increase healthcare spending and energy demand decreases poverty headcount, iv) poverty incidence and mortality rate negatively influenced healthcare expenditures, v) industrialization increases energy demand, and vi) agriculture value added, fertilizer, and cereal yields required more water supply to produce greater yield. The study emphasized the need to magnify the intensity of natural disasters and create natural disaster mitigation unit to access the human and infrastructure cost and attempt quick recovery for global prosperity.
The world faces a high alert of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), leading to a million deaths and could become infected to reach a billion numbers. A sizeable amount of scholarly work has been available on different aspects of social-economic and environmental factors. At the same time, many of these studies found the linear (direct) causation between the stated factors. In many cases, the direct relationship is not apparent. The world is unsure about the possible determining factors of the COVID-19 pandemic, which need to be known through conducting nonlinearity (indirect) relationships, which caused the pandemic crisis. The study examined the nonlinear relationship between COVID-19 cases and carbon damages, managing financial development, renewable energy consumption, and innovative capability in a cross section of 65 countries. The results show that inbound foreign direct investment first increases and later decreases because of the increasing coronavirus cases. Further, the rise and fall in the research and development expenditures and population density exhibits increasing coronavirus cases across countries. The continued economic growth initial decreases later increase by adopting standardized operating procedures to contain coronavirus disease. The inter-temporal relationship shows that green energy source and carbon damages would likely influence the coronavirus cases with a variance of 17.127% and 5.440%, respectively, over a time horizon. The policymakers should be carefully designing sustainable healthcare policies, as the cost of carbon emissions leads to severe healthcare issues, which are likely to get exposed to contagious diseases, including COVID-19. The sustainable policy instruments, including renewable fuels in industrial production, advancement in cleaner production technologies, the imposition of carbon taxes on dirty production, and environmental certifications, are a few possible remedies that achieve healthcare sustainability agenda globally.