The moderating role of environment-related technologies in the link between transportation infrastructure, agricultural, and environmental contamination in highly congested countries of the world

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ABSTRACT Densely populated countries have greater demand for agricultural output, greater vehicle usage, and busier traffic, so these countries devote more agricultural land to agricultural production and invest more in transportation infrastructure, resulting in higher environmental emissions. Most studies in literature assume that environment-related technologies directly diminish environmental contamination, while this study suggests that environment-related technologies indirectly mitigate environmental hazards through interactions with agricultural land use, agricultural value addition, and transportation infrastructure. Thus, this study determines to disclose the influence of agricultural land use, agricultural value added, and transportation infrastructure investment on ecological damage in countries with the highest population density during the period 1990–2022; and the sole moderating effect of environment-related technologies in the association of the proposed regressors with CO2 emissions. Results illustrate that agricultural land use and investment in transportation infrastructure contribute significantly to CO2 emissions, but only in the long term. However, agriculture value addition strongly promotes environmental contamination in both the short and long term. Furthermore, in the long run, the reversed U-designed EKC premise holds only for the top five most populous countries. Environmental contamination can be mitigated through environmentally relevant technologies when interacting with agriculture land use, value addition of agricultural and investment in transportation infrastructure. Finally, (>-1.115) is the estimated threshold level of environment-related technologies, at which agricultural land use, agricultural value added, and transportation infrastructure can significantly improve environmental quality. Policymakers in densely populated countries should prioritize the adoption of environmentally friendly technologies in agriculture and transportation to achieve environmental sustainability.