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A spatial-temporal decomposition of carbon emission intensity: a sectoral level analysis in Pakistan

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Abstract

We examine the relative performance of the industry, services, and agriculture sectors in energy conservation and reduction in CO2 emissions in Pakistan using the “spatial-temporal decomposition” method by taken data from 2006 to 2016. An efficient way to achieve low-carbon economy targets is to decompose different factors contributing to CO2 emissions, including structure effect, intensity effect, GDP gap effect, energy use efficiency effect, and economic efficiency. We classify economic sectors into three groups based on performance, i.e., sectors performing below, average, and above-average performing. Our results indicate that the economic efficiency and energy use efficiency effects in the industry sector have remained above average. In contrast, the GDP gap effect has remained below average. In the case of structure effect and intensity effect, the agriculture sector has performed on average. In contrast, the service sector has shown mixed results in all factors. The government should pay special attention to energy use structure and innovation to improve desirable output technical efficiency to achieve the target carbon emission level.

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Data availability

The data and replication files are available on request from the corresponding author.

Notes

  1. https://knoema.com/atlas/Pakistan/CO2-emissions-per-capita

  2. The DEA is a nonparametric method in investigating productivity and carrying out economic efficiency measurements. For further details on DEA method, see Charnes et al. (1978), Färe et al. (1994), Coelli et al. (2005), and Cooper et al. (2006)

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Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to anonymous referees for their valuable inputs to improve the quality of the article. The view presented in the article is those of the authors. The authors are responsible for any errors.

Funding

No funding was received for conducting this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Lahore, Sargodha, Pakistan

    Muhammad Azam & Zubair Rafiq

  2. COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Saima Nawaz

  3. Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), Islamabad, Pakistan

    Nasir Iqbal

Authors
  1. Muhammad Azam
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  2. Saima Nawaz
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  3. Zubair Rafiq
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  4. Nasir Iqbal
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Contributions

All authors contributed equally to this work:

• Muhammad Azam contributed to the article by contextualizing the idea and developing an initial draft.

• Saima Nawaz contributed to the article by conceptualization study and doing a literature review.

• Zubair Rafiq collected the data for empirical analysis, solves the mathematical model, and performs analysis.

• Nasir Iqbal finalized the article and explains the results and policy implications with the conclusion.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nasir Iqbal.

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Fig. 6
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Procedure to select reference region

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Azam, M., Nawaz, S., Rafiq, Z. et al. A spatial-temporal decomposition of carbon emission intensity: a sectoral level analysis in Pakistan. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 21381–21395 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-12088-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-12088-x

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