Climate change and health outcomes in Sub-Saharan African countries

This paper examines the effect of climate change on health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Greenhouse gas emission was used as the measure of climate change, while life expectancy rate was used as the measure of health outcomes. This paper's significant contribution is how the interaction of climate change and government effectiveness index influence health outcomes in SSA. We estimated the impact of climate change on health outcomes using the panel system generalized method of moments (GMM) method. Our empirical result show that there is a negative and significant relationship between climate change and life expectancy in the short and long run. In addition, we find that if effective government policy is interacted with climate change, this mutes the negative impact of climate change on health outcomes in SSA. This implies that, with effective government policies targeted toward achieving net zero carbon emission, climate change is not expected to have a significant impact on health outcomes in SSA.