Sustainable urbanization and vulnerability to climate change in Africa: Accounting for digitalization and institutional quality

This study empirically examines the effect of sustainable urbanization on vulnerability to climate change over a sample of 52 African countries from 1996 to 2019. We use the two-stage system generalized method of moments (GMM) empirical strategy and mediation analysis to assess direct and indirect impacts, respectively. The results of the direct analysis reveal that sustainable urbanization reduces vulnerability to climate change. The results of the indirect analysis also show that sustainable urbanization significantly reduces vulnerability to climate change through the channels of digitalization and institutional quality. The results also highlight that considering the direct effect of sustainable urbanization alone underestimates the impact of reducing vulnerability to climate change. The results are robust to an alternative indicator of vulnerability to climate and other estimation techniques. These results have important policy implications and provide evidence for the improvement of sustainable urbanization in terms of access to basic services or reduction of vulnerability to climate change.

Automated summary

This study empirically examines the effect of sustainable urbanization on vulnerability to climate change in 52 African countries from 1996 to 2019. Using the two-stage system generalized method of moments (GMM) and mediation analysis, the study assesses direct and indirect impacts. The results show that sustainable urbanization reduces vulnerability to climate change directly and indirectly through digitalization and institutional quality. These robust results have important policy implications for improving sustainable urbanization and reducing vulnerability to climate change in Africa.