The contribution of the anthropogenic impact of biomass utilization on ecological degradation: revisiting the G7 economies.

Abstract

The debate on ecological matters that relate to the biomass emissions nexus has gained prominence and different scholars have suggested various forms of policy directions to tackle the menace. This study seeks to contribute to this subject by examining the impact of biomass energy use on carbon dioxide pollution in the G7 economies context. Thus, to this end, we employed energy usage and GDP measured as economic growth which adds factors that can influence pollution for annual time-frequency between1995 and 2016 for the case of G7 economies. The present study adds to the extant literature by the adoption of the novel econometric techniques such as the panel cross-section augment ARDL and common correlated estimate mean group (CCEMG) to evaluate the impact of biomass energy on pollutants. The empirical results from all the techniques show that biomass energy consumption significantly and negatively correlates to CO2 emissions meaning that it helps to reduce pollution in the long run. On the other hand, there is a significant positive relationship between energy use and pollutants implying that the primary energy use is not favorable for environmental sustainability over the sampled period. Finally, the results proved that GDP increases CO2 emissions in the long run with respect to the G7 context. Thus, validating the growth-induced pollution hypothesis in G7 blocs. On causality relationship, we observe a unidirectional causal relationship between these variables: biomass and pollutants, pollutants and output, biomass and output, biomass and energy use, and output and energy use. While there was a bidirectional causality between energy use and pollutant, these results suggest policy implication for the G7 countries which indicates that stakeholders should give much attention to technological know-how and energy mix particularly biomass energy which is environmentally friendly as well as more paradigm shift to renewables.