Assessing the effect of energy consumption and food production from agriculture on environmental degradation in Pakistan: Does institutional quality matter?

The nexus between food production (FP), energy consumption (EC), institutional quality (IQ), and ecological degradation (ED) has important implications for environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, environmental degradation caused by FP is widely ignored, especially in Pakistan. To fill this void, we investigated the impact of energy use, FP, and IQ on Pakistan's environmental degradation between 1990 and 2021. We also explore the moderating influence of IQ on ED. To evaluate this influence, we use the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method for cointegration and the fully modified ordinary least-squares method for robustness estimation. Our empirical results demonstrate that, whereas FP and EC contribute to pollution, IQ reduces the pace of environmental degradation. Furthermore, the presence of a strong IQ mitigates the harmful ecological effects of FP and EC. Moreover, the results revealed that unbiased domestic IQ is crucial to boosting energy and agricultural efficiency while reducing CO emissions. Our findings might be considered while public policies to reduce carbon emissions and increase FP in a healthy environment are being developed. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2024;20:518-532. © 2023 (SETAC).