The influence of renewable energy consumption and trade openness on carbon emissions in South Africa: an augmented autoregressive distributed lag method application

This study examines the influence of renewable energy consumption and trade openness on CO2 emissions in South Africa. To do this, a recent and robust econometric approach, namely the augmented autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach, is used on the World Bank (WDI, 2025) dataset from the period 2002 to 2021. The results show that in South Africa, an increase in renewable energy consumption significantly reduces CO2 emissions in the short and long term, while an increase in trade openness damages the environment in the short term. Therefore, in order to address the challenges of climate change, energy security and socio-economic development in South Africa, this study suggests increasing the production and use of renewable energy; implementing commercial strategies that guarantee development and improve environmental quality; a significant reduction in the use of fossil fuels.