Pata Ugur Korkut, Yurtkuran Suleyman, Ahmed Zahoor, Kartal Mustafa Tevfik
Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of Economics, Osmaniye Korkut Ata University, 80000, Merkez, Osmaniye, Turkey.
Adnan Kassar School of Business, Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon.
Heliyon. 2023 Aug 29;9(9):e19567. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e19567. eCollection 2023 Sep.
Human activities threaten the future of the ecosystem by emitting pollution to the air, water, and soil. Considering the increasing ecological footprint (EF), the study focuses on investigating the role of life expectancy and hydropower consumption by controlling also income, trade openness, and globalization on the environment under the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis for Turkey during 1971-2018. In this context, the study performs recently developed augmented autoregressive distributed lag (AARDL) and dynamic ARDL (DARDL) methods. The results show that (i) life expectancy increases the environmental pressure; (ii) hydropower consumption has no effect on the EF; (iii) globalization and trade openness reduce the EF; (iv) the EKC hypothesis is valid, but the estimated turning point lies between USD 19,914 and USD 20,571, which is far from the sample period in Turkey. From the overall results, it can be concluded that Turkey cannot solve environmental problems with insufficient income levels, an increasing elderly population, and ineffective use of hydropower. Hence, Turkey should rely on income much more, use hydropower much more efficiently, and benefit from the spillover effect of technological innovations related to globalization and foreign trade to significantly reduce the EF.
人类活动通过向空气、水和土壤排放污染物威胁着生态系统的未来。考虑到生态足迹（EF）不断增加，本研究聚焦于在1971 - 2018年土耳其的环境库兹涅茨曲线（EKC）假说下，通过控制收入、贸易开放度和全球化等因素，来研究预期寿命和水电消耗对环境的作用。在此背景下，本研究采用了最近开发的增强自回归分布滞后（AARDL）和动态自回归分布滞后（DARDL）方法。结果表明：（i）预期寿命增加了环境压力；（ii）水电消耗对生态足迹没有影响；（iii）全球化和贸易开放度降低了生态足迹；（iv）EKC假说成立，但估计的转折点介于19,914美元至20,571美元之间，这与土耳其的样本期相差甚远。从总体结果可以得出结论，土耳其无法凭借收入水平不足、老年人口增加以及水电利用效率低下等情况来解决环境问题。因此，土耳其应更多地依赖收入，更高效地利用水电，并从与全球化和对外贸易相关的技术创新溢出效应中受益，以显著降低生态足迹。
