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Evaluating the symmetric and asymmetric effectiveness of low carbon energy consumption for ecological footprint in China: the role of environment-related technological innovation

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Abstract

The objective of this study is to scrutinize the impact of low carbon energy consumption, environmental-related technological innovation, urbanization, economic growth, and trade on China’s ecological footprint from 1980 to 2021. To investigate the nature of the long-term connections between the variables, we employ the symmetric and asymmetric autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) technique to explore the long- and short-run elasticities of coefficients. The results of ARDL and NARDL verified the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis in the long run in the presence of low carbon energy consumption. Moreover, the findings show that the positive part of low carbon energy consumption is negatively connected with the ecological footprint. Alternatively, the positive part of low carbon energy consumption is positively linked with the ecological footprint. The outcome highlights that environment-related technological innovation reduces the level of ecological footprint. Similarly, urbanization has a detrimental effect on the ecological footprint. Based on the estimated findings, it is suggested that China’s economy should place a greater emphasis on increasing its level of investment in the low carbon energy sector and adopting severe environmental legislation to protect the economy from environmental burden.

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Funding

This work was supported by the projects of humanities and social sciences of Cultivating plan for 1000 young and middle-aged backbone teachers in Guangxi Universities—research on the impact of environmental regulation evolution on corporate green and green investment in the dual-carbon environment (Grant No.2022QGRW059).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, Guilin Tourism University, Guilin, 541006, China

    Xin Jin

  2. College of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, United States

    Cheng Guo

  3. University of Management & Technology, Lahore, Pakistan

    Waheed Ahmad

  4. School of Economics, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Muhammad Sajid Ameen

  5. Graduate School of Economics and Management, Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russian Federation

    Shujaat Abbas

  6. Adnan Kaser School of Business, Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon

    Shujaat Abbas

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  1. Xin Jin
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  2. Cheng Guo
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  3. Waheed Ahmad
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Contributions

X.J.: conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, resources, writing—original draft, and supervision; C.G.: resources, writing—original draft, formal analysis, and supervision; W.A.: conceptualization, data curation, software, resources, writing—original draft, formal analysis, and writing—review and editing; M.S.A.: resources and writing—original draft; S.A.: resources and writing—review and editing.

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Correspondence to Shujaat Abbas.

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Jin, X., Guo, C., Ahmad, W. et al. Evaluating the symmetric and asymmetric effectiveness of low carbon energy consumption for ecological footprint in China: the role of environment-related technological innovation. Environ Sci Pollut Res 31, 1926–1940 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-31054-x

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