Carbon Emissions per Capita and Urbanisation Rate in the Southern African Development Community (SADC)

This paper investigated the impact of urbanisation on carbon (CO2) emissions per capita (pc) in 13 SADC nations covering data from 2002 to 2022. Urbanisation was represented by three different proxies: urban growth, urban to rural and urban to population growth. The Panel Estimated Generalised Least Squares (Cross-section seemingly unrelated regression) was employed for data analysis. The analysis showed negligible impact of the urbanisation proxies on CO2 emissions pc, indicating that urban growth in the SADC does not impact CO2 emissions pc. With the persistent growth in the urban population of Southern Africa, especially the SADC nations and with high percentage increase in carbon emissions, institutional and managerial policies encouraging environmentally friendly production activities to reduce CO2 emissions per capita do not necessarily need to take specific urbanisation characteristics into account.