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Motivated by the need to achieve a sustainable environment as entrenched in the Sustainable Development Goals and the conflicting evidence in the literature, this study scrutinises the effect of different components of globalisation on the environmental degradation of West African nations within the Environmental Kuznets Curve framework. Fully modified ordinary least squares, dynamic ordinary least squares, and the method of moments quantile regression of Machado and Silva (2019) are deployed as the estimation techniques. In the panel, cross-sectional dependence and non-normality are established. The findings from the quantile regression reveal a significant positive impact of economic growth on environmental degradation. The square of economic growth has an insignificant negative influence on environmental degradation. Thus, the EKC hypothesis is not valid in West African nations. Aggregate globalisation significantly influences environmental degradation, while economic and political globalisation significantly negatively impacts environmental degradation across the quantiles. However, social globalisation negatively impacts environmental degradation at a lower quantile (10–50 %), while at a higher quantile, the impact is positive. Natural resources significantly affect environmental degradation, while energy consumption in the region benefits the environment. Nevertheless, urbanisation has a different impact on environmental degradation in the area. The results of these studies are robust to other methods of estimation. The implications of the study are discussed.

When human ancestors preferred to eat less and did not want to abandon their old parents in the mountains, they did something that violated the previous natural laws; that is, after the task of giving birth and raising children, they should no longer waste valuable resources. However, this brought unexpected results. Older parents can take care of their grandchildren, making families with grandmothers have more children than families without grandmothers. Therefore, filial piety may be the main reason why human beings stand out from the apes. Doing things without utilitarian motives but that may have lasting utilitarian results and recognizing the relationship between the results and the behaviors) is an important characteristic of this kind of filial piety that occurs and persists. Culture is something that transcends today’s utilitarianism, is willing to pay for the value of emotion, aesthetics and morality, and, ultimately, has utilitarian results. This trait has always been accompanied by human development as a human cultural gene.