The dynamic link between eco-innovation and ecological footprint in India: does the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hold?

Abstract

PurposeThe eco-innovation is considered one of the possible ways to tackle climate change. However, the conflicting empirical evidence related to the role of eco-innovation on environmental quality becomes a motivation to explore the effect of eco-innovation on environmental degradation proxied by ecological footprint. Besides, it controls economic growth, remittance inflows, trade openness and total energy consumption in the environmental degradation function.Design/methodology/approachUses the Augmented Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (AARDL) approach to examine the cointegration relation among the series during the period ranging from 1975 to 2017 for India within the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework.FindingsThe result suggests that eco-innovation can mitigate climate change by reducing the ecological footprint. Similarly, economic growth reduces the ecological footprint in the short- and long-run. However, the square of economic growth is positive and significant. Thus, it shows evidence against the conventional EKC hypothesis. The results also reveal that remittance inflows have an insignificant negative role on the ecological footprint, while total energy consumption and trade openness harm the environment by enhancing the ecological footprint.Practical implicationsThis study provides important implications for climate change mitigation. Thus, the government should promote eco-innovation to mitigate climate change by offering a favorable legal environment to the firms to adopt the same in their production and consumption activities. It also suggests that initiatives like green strategies should give serious attention while incurring research expenditure.Originality/valueNo prior studies assess the impact of eco-innovation on the ecological footprint for the period of 1975–2017 in India.