Environmental protection and sustainable development are inextricably linked. This linkage is particularly crucial for North Africa, where the use of carbon-intensive energies has created environmental and economic challenges. Amazingly, limited studies on the connection between energy consumption and environmental quality has been conducted to help with policy options to minimize the above menace in the region. Inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, this study contributed to filling this gap by examining the energy consumption–CO₂ emission nexus in North Africa for the period 1990 to 2018. In order to account for cross-sectional dependence, endogeneity, and slope heterogeneity that are mostly ignored by some conventional econometric techniques, this exploration adopted second generation econometric methods that are robust to the aforestated issues in its analysis. From the results, the studied panel was heterogeneous and cross-sectionally correlated. Also, the investigated series were first differenced stationary and cointegrated in the long-run. The cross-sectional augmented autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) and the dynamic common correlated effects mean group (DCCEMG) estimators were adopted to explore the elasticities of the explanatory variables and from the results, energy consumption worsened environmental quality in the region due to its positive influence on CO₂ emissions. Also, urbanization and economic growth increased the rate of CO₂ emissions in the countries. On the causal connections amid the series, bidirectional causalities between energy consumption and CO₂ emissions, between urbanization and CO₂ emission, between economic growth and CO₂ emissions, and between urbanization and energy consumption were unraveled. Finally, unidirectional causalities from economic growth to energy consumption, and from economic growth to urbanization were confirmed. It is recommended that countries in North Africa should shift to the consumption of clean energies to help them attain low-carbon economy. Unavailability of data for some periods was the major limitation of the study. Therefore, in future when such data become available, similar explorations could be conducted to confirm the robustness of the study’s results.

环境保护与可持续发展密不可分。这种联系对北非尤其重要，因为那里的碳密集型能源的使用带来了环境和经济挑战。令人惊讶的是，对能源消耗和环境质量之间的联系进行了有限的研究，以帮助制定政策选择，以尽量减少该地区的上述威胁。受联合国可持续发展目标 (SDG) 的启发，本研究通过检查能源消耗——CO _{2有助于填补这一空白}1990 年至 2018 年期间北非的排放关系。为了解释一些传统计量经济学技术大多忽略的横截面依赖性、内生性和斜率异质性，本次探索采用了对上述数据具有鲁棒性的第二代计量经济学方法其分析中的问题。从结果来看，所研究的小组是异质的并且横截面相关。此外，研究的系列首先是差分平稳的，并在长期内是协整的。采用横截面增强自回归分布滞后 (CS-ARDL) 和动态共同相关效应均值组 (DCCEMG) 估计量来探索解释变量的弹性，并从结果中，₂排放。此外，城市化和经济增长增加了这些国家的 CO ₂排放率。在序列间的因果关系上，能源消费与CO ₂排放之间、城市化与CO ₂排放之间、经济增长与CO _{2之间的双向因果关系}排放，城市化和能源消耗之间的关系被解开。最后，确认了从经济增长到能源消耗、从经济增长到城市化的单向因果关系。建议北非国家转向清洁能源消费，帮助其实现低碳经济。某些时期的数据不可用是该研究的主要限制。因此，将来当这些数据可用时，可以进行类似的探索以确认研究结果的稳健性。