Climate change and variability pose a significant hindrance to agricultural productivity. The adverse effects are particularly concerning in many African countries that rely heavily on rainfed subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods. The promotion of climate-smart agriculture technologies as a pathway to enhancing food security, farmers' welfare, and providing climate adaptation and mitigation benefits is one of the several interventions aimed at improving agricultural productivity. However, there has been a dearth of evidence on the determinants of adoption of climate-smart agriculture practices as well as the impact of climate-smart agriculture practices on food security and household welfare. This paper contributes to this knowledge gap by using the probit model to explore the drivers of uptake of climate-smart agriculture practices, and the inverse probability weighting regression model and the instrumental variable approach to assess the impact on food security, household savings and household vulnerability. We find that the adoption of climate-smart agriculture practices among smallholder farmers is influenced by land ownership, climatic variables, land terrain and household sociodemographic characteristics. The study further revealed that adoption of climate-smart agriculture practices leads to a reduction in household savings and household vulnerability but leads to improved food security. Policy implications are also discussed.

Access to electricity in Zambia remains low, with most households dependent on traditional energy sources. This study analyzes data from a contingent valuation (CV) survey conducted by the World Bank to estimate household willingness to pay (WTP) for electricity connections among non-connected households. It evaluates two electrification technologies: grid electricity and solar home systems (SHS), categorized into low-capacity and high-capacity systems. The findings show that WTP is positive across technologies and increases with extended payment options. Mean WTP for grid electricity and high-capacity SHS exceeds market prices, indicating potential for private sector involvement in expanding access. In contrast, low-capacity SHS has a mean WTP below market prices, suggesting that subsidies are needed for viable private sector participation. This highlights the importance of offering electricity technologies that provide more than just lighting, particularly in rural areas where high-capacity systems can foster economic activities. The study also emphasizes the necessity for households to access credit financing or subsidies to afford market prices for solar PV systems and to manage their consumption effectively. Additionally, social factors such as housing quality and educational attainment significantly influence mean WTP for electricity connections across the various technologies.

Having a modern cooking stove at the household level provides an incomplete measure of cooking energy access. This limitation has necessitated the introduction of a multi-tier framework (MTF) to provide a more nuanced assessment. Thus, this study examines the overall, gendered, and rural-urban effects of cooking energy access under the MTF on health and time allocation to various household activities. Using the 2018 World Bank/ESMAP MTF dataset on Zambia, the study applies inverse probability regression adjustment with generalized propensity score to estimate pairwise average treatment effect on treated, by categorising households to tiers (0–5) based on six primary cooking energy attributes. The findings reveal that as households move up the MTF tiers, improvements in outcomes – such as reduced respiratory illness and better time allocation – are generally observed, though the magnitude of benefits tends to taper at higher tiers. Furthermore, women experience greater improvements relative to men, particularly in lower-tier transitions.

Zambia runs an agricultural input support program for 900,000 rural households, primarily targeting maize, the staple crop. A new delivery mode was introduced to the program, initially allowing farmers in 16 of the 115 districts to choose inputs using electronic vouchers, with the aim of encouraging crop diversification, amongst other objectives. Despite the potential benefits of this reform from a theoretical perspective, farmers may not always be able to diversify their crops due to existing barriers. In this paper, we examine how the electronic voucher reform impacted crop diversification and rotation practices at the household level during the pilot phase. The paper combines data from surveys conducted over two waves with 1518 rural households, high-resolution satellite rainfall data and in-depth qualitative interviews with 23 key informants. We find evidence that the reform had a positive impact (an increase of 0.231 points on the Simpson index of diversification) on crop diversification. However, there is no significant direct impact on crop rotation. We nevertheless observed that crop rotation can gain impetus only if farmers fully embrace crop diversification. Results from the qualitative interviews suggest that the limited effectiveness of electronic vouchers could be due to inadequacies in private sector input and output markets, as well as cultural preferences. Several important policy implications arise from these findings, including the need to promote markets for alternative crops and enhance extension services.

Successfully analyzing and managing trade-offs between community welfare and wildlife conservation are complex tasks that require a multidisciplinary approach and consideration of various factors. Bioeconomic modeling provides a structured quantitative framework for understanding and evaluating the complex interactions between biological systems and economic activities, aiding in the crafting of more effective and sustainable conservation and rural development strategies. Combined with results from other methods such as economic valuation, institutional analysis, impact evaluation, and framed-field experiments, they can provide guidance on reaching the social planner's optimum. The literature suggests significant roles for comanagement, benefit-sharing, and sustainable financing of conservation as the key ingredients for managing the trade-offs between communities’ welfare and nature conservation in Africa. However, comprehensive research tackling multiple problems simultaneously is required to fully understand and manage the trade-offs. Further, mainstreaming gender and climate change in studies of the trade-offs is increasingly becoming an obligation.

Access to electricity has been linked to economic growth through improved agricultural and firm productivity, public service delivery, enhanced household investment in human capital, and increased net income and general quality of life. Yet, as of 2024, more than 540 million people in Africa still lacked electricity, and many more suffered from unreliable power supply. The considerable untapped renewable energy potential in the region, and rapid recent reductions in cost, make sustainable and decentralized electricity service a promising option for transforming these deficits into opportunities. However, a key challenge is that knowledge on how to finance and implement new models of electrification remains limited, because the results from prior evaluation work are inconclusive and do not cover all relevant interventions or dimensions. Following a review of policy and research issues, we propose that five essential principles should guide future research in this domain: (i) use of mixed/multi methods that adequately cover the varied implications of electricity access and leverage learning in other disciplines, (ii) choice of econometric methods that provide more credible estimates of impacts, (iii) use and combinations of more informative treatment data, (iv) careful theorizing and consideration of the potential for heterogeneous treatment effects, and (v) more explicit accounting for differences in the nature of electrification interventions. We reference a simple illustrative application to show that the estimated impacts of electrification are sensitive to several of these aspects. A greater focus on impact evaluations that account for intervention and contextual nuances is needed to make economic research on sustainable electrification more informative and policy-relevant.

There is competition for land between Maasai pastoralists and the park agency in the Serengeti ecosystem. The park agency wants to use the land for wildlife conservation while the pastoralist community wants to use it for livestock grazing. Predatory wildlife kills livestock while herbivorous wildlife competes with livestock for water and grazing. In retaliation, the Maasai hunt predators and grazers to protect their livestock and also to supply the black market for wildlife products. With both the Maasai and animal populations growing, increased conflicts are inevitable. This paper develops a bioeconomic model with three animal species to analyse the optimal combination of pastoral activities and wildlife conservation in the Serengeti ecosystem. Using Pontryagin's maximum principle, the market problem for each agent is optimized and compared to the social planner's outcome. Results show that the market solutions are suboptimal because of negative externalities affecting both agents and inadequate regard to biodiversity conservation values. Mathematical simulations of the bioeconomic model are used to generate a solution in which the Maasai pastoralists and park agency can optimally share the land for their mutual benefit. The policy implication is that the government should establish an independent regulatory institution with a primary mandate of balancing the contested socioeconomic and ecological needs of stakeholders in prime ecosystems such as the Serengeti.

The Paris Accord has brought the world's governments together to begin implementing plans for their individual economies to become carbon-free. The goal of attaining low-carbon growth is not, however, as simple as it would appear since the world economies, which are dependent on fossil fuels and are fast expanding, are concentrated on accelerating economic expansion at the price of worse environmental effects. In light of this, the study aims to investigate the combined effects of the composite risk index (CRI), green innovation (GINOV), and environmental policy stringency (EPS) on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the context of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) countries while controlling for gross domestic product (GDP) and renewable energy research and development (RERD) over the period from 1960 to 2020. The research addresses the problems of cross-sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity in the data set used for analysis by using the second-generation cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lags framework to evaluate long- and short-run models. The corresponding findings show cointegrating relationships between the research variables. Additionally, the results of the regression demonstrate that EPS, GINOV, and RERD contribute to a long-term decrease in CO2 emissions. CRI and GDP, however, increase CO2 emissions. It is suggested that environmental policies be tightened, GINOV and RERD expenditures be promoted, political stability and institutional quality be maintained, and clean economic growth strategies be adopted in order to help the BRICS countries reduce sectoral risks, create a sustainable environment, and decarbonize their respective economies.

Reaching decarbonization goals has become a top focus for several industrialized and emerging economies globally. The greatest effect of human behavior is global warming. Utilizing fiscal decentralization (FDST), export diversification (EDI), and environment-related technological innovation (ERTI) may be necessary to address global pollution and accomplish environmental sustainability goals. Additionally, these strategies could aid various levels of government and nations in pursuing what they define as sustainable development. This study evaluates the combined benefits of FDST, EDI and ERTI in meeting the environmental sustainability goals of the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) economies from 1970 to 2020. Using the augmented mean group method, the long-run dynamic equilibrium between the chosen variables is examined. The findings demonstrate that while the adoption of ERTI and renewable energy (REC) benefits the environment, EDI, FDST, and economic growth exacerbate environmental deterioration. Our findings suggest that the BRICS countries should proceed cautiously when adopting FDST and EDI plans. The adoption of ERTI and REC should be promoted by the government to increase environmental sustainability.

South Africa, like most developing nations, is confronted with choosing between the need to advance their economy and the need to protect the environment. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs-7, 11, 12 & 13) provide a strong foundation for this investigation. To this end, the current research investigates the combined impacts of economic policy uncertainty, fiscal decentralization, and green innovation on environmental sustainability for the instance of South Africa with yearly frequency data from 1960 to 2020. The current research leverages on dynamic ordinary least squares, fully modified ordinary least squares, and canonical cointegration regression. The Maki cointegration test shows how the variables being evaluated have an equilibrium connection across the time period under review. Empirical findings support the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework. These findings imply that, in the first stages of economic expansion, ecological environment is being sacrificed for economic progress (scale stage). Based on the EKC hypothesis, long-term quadratic economic growth reduces emissions by 0.162% whereas a 1% rise in economic growth increases emissions by 0.791%. Similar to this, long-term economic globalization and economic policy uncertainty impair ecological sustainability, whereas long-term fiscal decentralization and green innovation raise it in South Africa. These results have broad environmental repercussions. The present investigation supported environmental stick measures and investment in initiatives on a fundamental change from fossil-fuel energy consumption base to renewables. The final portion highlights further insights.