Assessing the Role of Environmental Expenditures and Green Transport in Emissions Released by Transport: An Application of ARDL Approach

Zahid Hussain,Muhammad Kaleem Khan,Zhiqing Xia,Cuifen Miao,Weitu Zhang

doi:10.3389/fenvs.2021.769608

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of transport and environmental factors on transport carbon dioxide emissions (TCO2). It employs cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lags for the estimation in the short and long runs and examines the panel time-series data from 2000 to 2020 in the OECD countries. This method allows heterogeneity in the dependencies and slope parameters across the countries. The results demonstrate that road and railway traffic movements increase the amount of TCO2in the short and long runs. In addition, transport energy consumption is the driving factor in releasing TCO2in the long run. Moreover, the joint effect of locomotives and transport energy consumption significantly reduces TCO2in the short run. By contrast, the findings support the argument that environmental expenditures and green transport mitigate TCO2in the long run. The findings also show an inverted u-shaped relationship between TCO2and transport energy consumption. With the empirical findings as a basis, we suggest that the OECD countries should reduce traffic movements and enhance the environmental expenditures so that they may produce green transport vehicles to combat environmental issues.

Highlights

The transport sector has gained great attention owing to concern over environment quality
Oneway causality to transport CO2 emissions (TCO2) cannot be reversed among variables such as transport energy consumption, environmental government budget, and road locomotive
Tao and Wu. (2021) support that any policy change in transport energy consumption cannot affect TCO2 emissions indicating that the transport energy consumption independently does work in its own mechanism without being affected by external factors

Summary

Introduction

The transport sector has gained great attention owing to concern over environment quality. Environment quality is deteriorating because of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the most critical challenge for countries (Ahmad et al, 2021). The transport sector is a major contributor to CO2 emissions, accounting for approximately 23% (Seum et al, 2020; Churchill et al, 2021; Sohail et al, 2021). IEA (2019) reports that approximately one-third of global CO2 emissions are from the transport sector. Several economic activities such as wide-range development of transport infrastructure, traffic movement of vehicles, population growth, and economic growth have enhanced demand for transport vehicles, which indicate critical threats to sustainable development

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Conclusion