Unlocking Africa's Green Potentials for Sustainable Growth: Examining the Role of Renewable Energy Technologies, Biocapacity Protection, and Government Policies on <scp> CO ₂ </scp> Emissions

ABSTRACT This study examines the environmental determinants of CO 2 emissions across African countries from 2000 to 2020, employing Dynamic Common Correlated Effects (DCCE) and Bayesian Stochastic Quantile Regression (BSQR) approaches. The analysis reveals significant cross‐sectional dependence in environmental variables, particularly in renewable energy (51.2786, p &lt; 0.01) and forest coverage (33.2233, p &lt; 0.01). The DCCE estimation identifies substantial impacts of forest area (−0.3818, p &lt; 0.01) and renewable energy (−0.0123, p &lt; 0.01) on emissions reduction. Biocapacity demonstrates a notable transformational impact on emissions reductions (−54.1978, p &lt; 0.01). The BSQR analysis uncovers quantile‐dependent relationships, with renewable energy's impact varying from −0.001 at lower emission quantiles to −2.641 at higher quantiles. Government policy maintains a consistent negative relationship (−0.0070, p &lt; 0.01) in the long run, while R&amp;D demonstrates increased importance (−0.0347, p &lt; 0.01) compared to its lower quantiles. Sensitivity analysis confirms the robustness of these relationships, particularly for population growth (−1.4613, std = 0.2569) and R&amp;D (−0.2064, std = 0.0459). These findings suggest that effective environmental policy in Africa requires temporally calibrated, regionally coordinated green approaches that account for varying emission levels across countries.