Abstract:

Pollution is hurting human lives severely all over the globe since last few decades. It is entirely associated with socioeconomic conditions of a country and require serious efforts to impede environmental apprehensions. The present study investigates the impact of urbanization, economic growth, electric power consumption, socioeconomic condition and globalization on carbon dioxide emissions using time series data for Pakistan. The most flexible ecological framework STIRPAT is used to test the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis for the period 1980-2019. The empirical findings of an Auto-regressive distributed lag approach reveal that urbanization, economic growth, socioeconomic condition and globalization increases carbon emissions in the long run. The study also found insignificant linkage of electric power consumption with carbon emissions. Urbanization and economic growth are significant contributors of carbon emissions in the short run. An inverted U shaped environmental Kuznets curve exists between urbanization and carbon emissions in short run as well as in the long run with a turning point at 33.90%. The error correction model evaluates the period of 1.02 years for diverging the short term disturbance to long term equilibrium. The study concludes that government must be vigilant towards unorganized urban sprawl and ensure sustainable socioeconomic conditions to curb the air pollution. The policy makers are suggested to devise environment friendly policies particularly related to renewable energy use for environmental protection.

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