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Carbon efficiency and sustainable environment in India: impacts of structural change, renewable energy consumption, fossil fuel efficiency, urbanization, and technological innovation

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Abstract

Minimizing carbon pollution and fossil fuels is among the most crucial issues in the sustainable development goals (SDGs). However, global environmental concerns have increased since India did not sign the global coal pledge at COP 26. It is therefore a question mark how India will achieve the 2070 carbon-free target with the increasing use of coal and oil. In this contenxt, this work examines the impact of fossil fuel efficiency, structural change, renewable energy consumption, technological innovation, and urbanization on carbon efficiency in India from 1980 to 2019. Employing the dynamic autoregressive distributed lag approach; the study reveals that fossil fuel efficiency, structural change, renewable energy, and technological innovation improve carbon efficiency, while urbanization worsens environmental quality. Based on the study’s findings, the Indian government should invest more and incentivize technological innovation that supports fossil fuel efficiency and renewable energy deployment to achieve the SDGs.

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Fig. 1

Source: Our World in Data (2022), World Bank (2022)

Fig. 2

Source: World Bank (2022)

Fig. 3

Source: World Bank (2022)

Fig. 4
Fig. 5

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Data availability

The sources of data have been duly mentioned in the study. The datasets analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. For a small sample size, the critical values of Kripfganz and Schneider (2020) provide robust and trustworthy outputs (Danish and Ulucak 2020). These critical values are preferred in this study as it includes a small sample size.

Abbreviations

ADF:

Augmented Dickey-Fuller

ARCH:

Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity

ARDL:

Autoregressive distributed lag

BP:

British Petroleum

BPG:

Breusch-Pagan-Godfrey

CE :

Carbon efficiency

CO2 :

Carbon dioxide emissions

COP 26:

Climate change conference

CUSUM:

Conventional cumulative sum

DSARDL:

Dynamic simulated ARDL

FFC :

Fossil fuel consumption

FFE :

Fossil fuel efficiency

ECT :

Error correction term

GDP:

Gross domestic product

IEA:

International Energy Agency

IND:

Industrial value added

IRENA:

International Renewable Energy Agency

JB:

Jarque-Bera

kWh:

Kilowatt hours

LM:

Lagrange multiplier

MVA:

Manufacturing value added

PP:

Phillips-Perron

REC :

Renewable energy consumption

SC :

Structral change

SDGs:

Sustainable development goals

SER:

Service sector value added

TI :

Technological innovation

TO :

Trade openness

UN:

United Nations

URB :

Urbanization

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Gaziantep University, Gaziantep, Turkey

    Mehmet Akif Destek

  2. Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of Economics, Osmaniye Korkut Ata University, 80000, MerkezOsmaniye, Turkey

    Ugur Korkut Pata

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  1. Mehmet Akif Destek
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MAD: conceptualization, writing original draft, writing — review and editing, and investigation. UKP: data curation, methodology, software, investigation, formal analysis, writing — review and editing, and writing original draft.

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Correspondence to Ugur Korkut Pata.

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Destek, M.A., Pata, U.K. Carbon efficiency and sustainable environment in India: impacts of structural change, renewable energy consumption, fossil fuel efficiency, urbanization, and technological innovation. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 92224–92237 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-28641-3

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