Towards sustainable resource management: A short and long-run dynamics of mineral production on ecological footprint

Abstract

The effect of mineral production on ecological footprint is examined in this study while controlling for economic growth, renewable energy consumption, and trade openness as additional determinants for Pakistan. On the empirical front, the study uses the “Dynamic Autoregressive Distributed Lag (DYNARDL)” simulations for the data collected between 1990 and 2021. The result portrays movement to the long-run equilibrium relationship when considering the ecological footprint as the outcome variable amidst mineral production, economic growth, renewable energy consumption, and trade openness as the covariates. Further, the finding shows temporal dynamics of mineral production on environmental quality with a short-term degradation versus long-term amelioration, which suggests that mineral production can be conducted more sustainably over time with an implication towards taking measures such as technological advancements, improved efficiency, and better waste management practices. Additionally, it failed to find evidence for the conventional “Environmental Kuznets Curve,” implying a need for policy reevaluation, reassessment of economic development models and accounting for environmental externalities in economic decision-making. Besides, as expected, the outcome demonstrates that using renewable energy lowers the ecological footprint both in long and short terms, which indicates that utilization of renewable energy sources reduces reliance on fossil fuels, resulting in decreased environmental degradation, thereby fostering the need for emphasis on the importance of continued technological innovation in renewable energy technologies to reduce the ecological footprint further. Moreover, it shows that trade openness improves the environmental quality in the short run (worsens it in the long run), thereby highlighting that trade openness may lead to short-term environmental benefits by promoting cleaner technologies and increasing resource efficiency. However, in the long term, trade openness can exacerbate environmental degradation due to economic priorities often taking precedence over environmental concerns.