NEURAL NETWORK BASED ESTIMATION OF ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN TURKEY WITH ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS

Abstract

The globe is currently confronted with escalating ecological challenges as a result of the exponential growth of the population, the expansion of industrial activities, the rapid urbanization process, and the heightened levels of consumption. Due to the prevailing ecological issues, there has been an unbridled surge in the demand for natural resources. The emergence of the Ecological Footprint was driven by the observable escalation of environmental degradation, with the primary objective of promoting sustainability. In this study, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model was developed for the estimation of ecological footprint. In the first stage, the variables affecting the ecological footprint were determined. It was concluded that there are strong relationships between the independent variables of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), KOF Globalization Index (KOFGI), and Natural Resource Rent (NRR) and the dependent variable of ecological footprint. In the light of this information, the data of GDP (% annual increase), NRR (% GDP) and KOF Globalization Index and ecological footprint data of Turkey between 1970 and 2016 were used to present the ANN model. Feed-Forward Backprop Method, which is one of the multi-layer network models, was applied in the modeling of the ANN. Levenberg-Marquardt optimization, which updates the weight and bias values of the network, was used as the network training function. The study's results suggest that there was a strong correlation between the whole dataset and the model's accuracy, with a close match of 99.316%. Based on the findings, it can be deduced that the developed artificial neural network (ANN) model has a significant level of precision in forecasting the Ecological Footprint.