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Evaluating the nexus between ongoing and increasing urbanization and carbon emission: a study of ARDL-bound testing approach

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Abstract

The growing urbanization has created a substantial economic imbalance between the urban and rural households in the world’s emerging economies and put a significant effect on carbon dioxide emissions. Simultaneously, many researchers have grown concerned by the significant consequences of urbanization on carbon emissions. In current research, we make an effort in Pakistan to investigate how urbanization affects the carbon emissions. In order to attain the intended goals of long run and short run investigation, we employed the most appropriate method of auto-regressive distributed lag model for time series data-set, while the vector error correction model, on the other hand, was employed to investigate causation. The estimated findings of the auto-regressive distributed lag model supported the association amongst the model’s selected variables. In long and short run, the estimated findings approved that as the level of urbanization rises, so does the carbon emissions. Furthermore, the estimated results of the vector error correction model acknowledged the validity of short run unidirectional causal relationship from urbanization towards carbon emissions and from carbon emission towards energy consumption, as well as in short run, where economic growth one-way Granger generates the carbon emission. To summarize, based on the current findings, that reflects the significance of the underlined factors. The study recommends that government should prioritize the development of energy efficient and environment friendly strategies with respect to fast growing urbanization to control the carbon emission.

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Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is supported by Program of the Humanities and social sciences of the Ministry of Education of China “Research on the synergistic effect of carbon market mechanism design on carbon emission reduction and smog control” (grant number 20YJA790082); the key program of National Social Science Foundation of China “Research on the maturity of China’s carbon market and environmental regulation policy” [grant number 14AZD051]; National Natural Science Foundation of China “Modelling Carbon Price Drivers with Optimized Smart Methods”[grant number 71101133]; Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University “Carbon finance innovation Research on the price formation mechanism of international carbon market” [grant number NCET-11-0725].

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  1. Lan Yi

    Present address: International Business School, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, 710119, China

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  1. International Business School, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, 710119, China

    Muhammad Abu Sufyan Ali

  2. Jinhe Center for Economic Research, Xian Jiaotong University, Xian, 710049, China

    Lan Yi

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Muhammad Abu Sufyan Ali: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Software, Methodology, Writing—original draft. Lan Yi: Writing—review and editing—Funding acquisition, Investigation, Software, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision.

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Correspondence to Lan Yi.

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Ali, M.A.S., Yi, L. Evaluating the nexus between ongoing and increasing urbanization and carbon emission: a study of ARDL-bound testing approach. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 27548–27559 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-17858-9

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