Effect of Climate Change and Selected Macroeconomic Variables on Food Security in South Africa

Abstract

Ensuring a balanced and economically healthy environment is paramount for attaining zero hunger in Africa. This vision is threatened by climate change, a multivariate concept which impacts different sectors, most notably the agri-food sector. This study examined the effect of climate change and selected macroeconomic variables on food security in South Africa, focusing on developing relevant policy decisions to promote sustainable food systems in one of Africa's most industrialised economies. Time series data on South Africa, covering the period of 1990 to 2022, were sourced from the World Development Indicators database. The study applied the ADF unit root test to examine their stationarity properties. At the same time, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach to cointegration (ARDL) was used to investigate the long-run and short-run relationships of the selected climate and macroeconomic variables and food security in South Africa.Results from the short-run dynamics revealed that past changes (lagged values) in CO2 emissions, food import index, and particulate emission damage significantly impact food security. The error correction term indicated a strong adjustment to the long-term equilibrium, suggesting that food security responds quickly to deviations from its long-term trend. The high R-squared and adjusted R-squared values indicated that the model explains a substantial portion of the variance in food security. The model's diagnostics revealed no significant issue of autocorrelation in the residuals. At the same time, the absence of an ARCH effect indicates that the variance of the residuals is constant over time, and conditional heteroskedasticity is equally not an issue in the fitted model.