Zusammenfassung:
Climate change poses severe risks to developing economies, particularly those in the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ), where agriculture and climate-sensitive sectors drive growth. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and extreme weather events increasingly disrupt output, fuel inflation, and destabilise exchange rates, undermining both national resilience and regional integration under the ECOWAS single currency agenda. However, empirical evidence on the magnitude and channels of these impacts in the WAMZ remains limited. This study examines the relationship between climate change and real sector performance in the WAMZ Member States using a balanced annual panel dataset from 1974-2024. Temperature is employed as a proxy for climate shocks, alongside key macroeconomic variables: real GDP growth, inflation (GDP deflator), and exchange rates. A Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (Panel-ARDL) technique is applied to capture both short- and long-run dynamics. The results suggest that a 1 percent increase in temperature is associated with a 28.8 percent and 0.68 percent increase price index and real GDP growth rate, respectively in the long-run, underscoring climate change's non-trivial macroeconomic effects. Climate change policy analysis indicates that existing climate strategies across WAMZ Member States remain fragmented, weakly coordinated, and insufficiently integrated into macroeconomic frameworks. The study argues for harmonised regional climate policies, climate-smart investment, and resilience-oriented macroeconomic planning aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. By providing the first panel-based evidence of climate change's macroeconomic effects in the WAMZ, this study highlights the urgent need for coordinated regional responses to safeguard sustainable growth and the monetary integration agenda.