Dynamic environmental quality effect of nuclear energy intensity, structural changes, and natural resources in Pakistan: testing load capacity factor hypothesis evidence

Abstract

AbstractWith both electricity and clean energy cooking accessible to 40 million and over 100 million people respectively, Pakistan’s ecological challenges could persist as long as the energy-related issues remained unsolved. This is the motivation for examining the drivers of the country’s biocapacity and ecological footprint vis-a-vis load capacity factor (LCF) from the perspective of nuclear energy intensity, natural resources, structural change, and economic growth. By using the recently developed simulation of autoregressive distributed lag for dataset that covers 1971 to 2021, this investigation found that nuclear energy intensification and structural change both improves environmental quality by increasing the country’s ratio of biocapacity against its ecological footprint in the long run. Specifically, nuclear energy intensity and structural change have respective elasticities of 0.02 and 0.34 with LCF. With the country’s nuclear energy supply far below the natural gas, oil, and biofuels and waste sources, the country might as well be encouraged to increase the development of nuclear energy in tackling the persistent environmental woes. Contrarily, the investigation established that natural resources in the country is detrimental to environmental quality but only in the short run because a percent increase in natural resources is responsible for ~ 0.035 percent decline in LCF. Importantly, an inverted U-shaped relationship ensued between economic growth and LCF but only statistically significant in the long-run i.e. invalidating LCF hypothesis, thus suggesting an undesirable environmental consequence of economic prosperity. As a policy, and given the novel perspectives of nuclear energy intensity and structural change dynamics, these results incentivize Pakistan’s nuclear energy development drive and among among other environmental and economic policy initiatives. Graphical abstract