Effects of agriculture, renewable energy, and economic growth on carbon dioxide emissions: Evidence of the environmental Kuznets curve

Abstract

This study contributes to (1) discovering that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are not directly influenced by modernisation; (2) attaining sustainable agriculture by incorporating renewable energy into the agriculture sector as an effective CO2 emissions mitigation measure; and (3) applying the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) to test the relationships among attributes in Malaysia. Prior studies have not addressed the associations between the release of CO2 and economic development, renewable energy, urbanisation, and agriculture in Malaysia. Hence, the objective of the study is to investigate the relationships of the emissions of CO2 and economic development, renewable energy, urbanisation, and agricultural subsectors, such as crops, livestock, and fisheries, in Malaysia for the period 1978 to 2016. By the utilisation of the autoregressive distributed lag test for cointegration, CO2 emissions significantly increased due to economic growth and urbanisation but insignificantly increased due to livestock in the long term. Crops, fisheries, and renewable energy significantly reduced emissions in this period. Moreover, this study reveals that the association between emissions of CO2 and economic development is an inverted U. This finding indicates that CO2 emissions eventually decrease despite the increase in CO2 emissions and economic development in the long term upon reaching a specific level of growth. These findings are consistent for Malaysia in terms of the EKC hypothesis.