Climate change and food security nexus in Ghana: The role of renewable energy

Climate change is aggravating hunger, which is miserable in Sub-Saharan African nations like Ghana. Yet evidence of the effect of climatic variables on hunger, particularly multidimensional food security, is less illuminated in Ghana. Moreover, the decoupling effect of renewable energy on emissions and food security is rare in the Ghanaian context. Therefore, we fill this gap using time series data from 1990 to 2022. The autoregressive distributed lag model was used to analyse the data, while the dynamic ordinary least squares and fully modified ordinary least squares were employed for robustness. Additionally, the seemingly unrelated regression was used to evaluate the effect of climate change on tomatoes, rice, cocoa, cashews, maize, cassava, and yam output. We discovered a long-run co-integration between climatic factors and food security. Moreover, rising temperatures worsen food security in the short run but eventually improve in the long run. Again, temperature improves the production of the studied crops. In the short term, precipitation disturbs food security but suddenly improves in the future. Similarly, rainfall increases the production of the studied crops. Moreover, CO2 stifles long-term food security and reduces rice production. However, renewable energy counteract the deleterious consequence of CO2 on food security in the future. Theoretically, the effect of climate change on food security follows the assumption of the Environmental Kuznets Curve to some extent in Ghana. Therefore, adopting irrigation, greenhouses, agricultural insurance, and improved crop varieties will help farmers manage the wrath of climate change. Also, policies like carbon credits, tax incentives for renewable energy, investment funds, and solar panel subsidies can further promote sustainability and climate change mitigation. [Display omitted] •We modelled climate change-renewable energy-food security nexus in Ghana.•Temperature worsens food security in the short term and improves it in the long run.•Rainfall threatens food security in the short term but reduces it in the long term.•CO2 has no effect on food security in the short term but threatens it in the long run.•Renewable energy reverses the negative effect of CO2 on food security in the long run.