The impact of natural resources rent, renewable energy, and governance on the environmental sustainability—Evidence from resource-rich countries

Abstract

Natural resources are vital in alleviating the effects imposed by human activities on the environment. For this reason, the preservation and wise utilization of natural resources has been emphasized and some laws toward ensuring that natural resources are not wasted have been put in place. However, high rents on natural resources are not sustaining. By following the STIRPAT model, this research seeks to assess the role played by natural resources rent, the rule of law, and renewable energy in alleviating the damage caused to the environment by human activities. The present research furthers the growing body of literature on the topic, which constitutes its primary contribution. To attain this goal, the dataset of the top 10 natural resource-rich African countries, for the time range 1990 to 2021 is used. The dynamic Cross-sectional Autoregressive Distributive Lag (CS-ARDL) which overcomes heterogeneity, cross-sectional dependence (CD), and dynamics is used in the analysis of the research model. The Augmented Mean Group (AMG) and the dynamic Common Correlated Estimator Mean Group (CCEMG) methods are employed to check the robustness of CS-ARDL results. The findings illustrate that economic growth, natural resources rent, and energy intensity promote environmental damage, while renewable energy (RE) and the rule of law lessen it. This research advocates for the reduction and stabilization of natural resources rent, extensive use of RE, and improvements in the rule of law to alleviate environmental damage.