Renewable energy adoption and its associations with cereal productivity and carbon emissions in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and South Africa

Abstract This study examines the energy-food-climate nexus in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and South Africa using an annual country-year panel assembled from six public datasets. The analysis combines modern renewables as a share of total energy supply, cereal yield, territorial fossil-fuel and industrial CO₂ emissions per capita, GDP per capita, fertilizer use per hectare of cropland, and annual precipitation. The common six-variable sample contains 232 observations over 1965–2022. Dynamic two-way fixed-effects models show strong persistence in per-capita CO₂ emissions (lag coefficient = 0.801, p < 0.001). Conditional on persistence, GDP per capita, cereal yield, country effects and year effects, renewable-energy share is not statistically associated with contemporaneous CO₂ emissions (beta = -0.0007, p = 0.947). In the agricultural-productivity equation, renewable-energy share is positively associated with cereal yield (beta = 0.0829, p = 0.010); precipitation (beta = 0.1742, p = 0.006) and GDP per capita (beta = 0.4854, p = 0.001) are also positive. Static fixed-effects estimates show a stronger negative renewable-emissions association, indicating that failure to model emissions persistence can materially alter inference. The evidence suggests potential complementarity between modern renewable-energy adoption and cereal productivity, while short-run national emissions effects are difficult to identify after accounting for persistence and common shocks. Results are deliberately bounded to the four economies covered by the supplied modern-renewables series.