Forest, agriculture, renewable energy, and CO2 emission

The paper investigates the effects of renewable energy consumption, agriculture production and forest on carbon dioxide (CO2) emission in Pakistan. To do so, we use annual data over the period of 1990-2014 and employ the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model to examine their long-run and short-run impacts on CO2 emission. We find that in the long run, renewable energy consumption and forest have negative and significant effects on CO2 emission, which indicates that CO2 emission can be reduced by increasing renewable energy usage and forest area. In contrast, agricultural production positively and significantly affects CO2 emission in the long run which implies that agriculture production is also a major carbon source in Pakistan. Moreover, in the short-run, renewable energy consumption and forest have shown similar results while the effects from agriculture become statistically insignificant. In addition, we also show that forest planting is more effective to reduce CO2 emission relative to renewable energy and agriculture. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.