Abstract
The objective of this research is to discuss the relationship between the growth of livestock and the environmental impact it generates in Colombia. For this, data were extracted from the FAO STAT for the period of 1961 to 2017. The livestock inventory has had a significant growth during the last 50 years. This has generated environmental exposure and the release of carbon, sequestered by continuous deforestation performed in the practice of extensive livestock. Recurring to vector error correction models, we observed the existence of long-term relations between CO2 emissions from dairy cattle and emissions from slaughtered cattle, deforestation, pastures, and forest development. Changes in CO2 emissions from dairy cattle tend to be anticipated by changes in CO2 emissions from the other analyzed sources, which prove how the current investment in dairy cattle results from the accumulated debates in Colombia regarding the different sources of livestock emissions.
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Notes
Following Neuhaus (2006, p.122), we must conclude that under a valid cointegration relationship, there is no serious issue with multicollinearity or endogeneity among the regressors. However, we ran tests on the multicollinearity of the independent variables of the equations exhibited here and obtained variance inflation factors below 10 (favoring the hypothesis of non-multicollinearity). We also ran Durbin-Hausman-Hu tests on our six long-term equations and determined an absence of endogenous threats. Full details are available upon request.
For this statistics, we considered the values obtained for the Schwarz’s Bayesian information criterion (SBIC). Full results are available upon request.
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This paper is financed by National Funds of the FCT—Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology within the project «UIDB/03182/2020».
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All the 3 Authors (David Roberto Patiño Domínguez; Nadja Simone Menezes Nery de Oliveira; Paulo Reis Mourao) have contributed to the different phases of this research.
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Patiño-Domínguez, D.R., de Oliveira, N.S.M.N. & Mourao, P.R. Cointegrated land use and CO2 emissions—the silent Columbian cattle revolution. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 11030–11039 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-11133-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-11133-z