Analyzing the impact of energy consumption on environmental excellence: A dominating role of economic globalization in North African countries

ABSTRACT Energy consumption plays a crucial role in achieving the three pillars of the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Moreover, the increasing impact of energy use in the development of North Africa motivates the authors to examine its direct impact on environmental degradation. Thus, the key objective of this investigation is to analyze the imperative impact of energy consumption on environmental degradation within the framework of urbanization and economic globalization. A fundamental hypothesis of the study includes that energy consumption and urbanization positively affect environmental degradation. The investigation employed the Cross-Sectional – Autoregressive Distributed Lag model and found that energy consumption significantly increases environmental degradation. However, economic globalization decreases environmental degradation. Moreover, urbanization showed inconsequential findings, but the study found that African countries hold the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. The Dumitrescu-Hurlin causality model verifies the causality effect between energy consumption, economic globalization, urbanization, economic growth, and ecological footprints.