Growing green? Forecasting CO2 emissions with Environmental Kuznets Curves and Logistic Growth Models

Role of Economic Growth, Financial Development, Trade, Energy and FDI in Environmental Kuznets Curve for Lithuania: Evidence from ARDL Bounds Testing Approach

“…Conversely, these economic activities cause the accumulation of pollutant gases in the atmosphere leading to global warming (Andreoni and Galmarini, 2016) and drastic changes in the global climate (Nordhaus, 1977;Hanif, Raza, Gago-de-Santos, & Abbas, 2019). One of the dangerous and most emitted gases from economic activities is carbon dioxide (CO2), which plays a crucial role in environmental degradation (Perez-Suarez & Lopez-Menendez, 2015). In this trade-off, ecological sustainability is desired along with economic development-restricting environmental degradation throughout economic growth.…”

Employing the shared socioeconomic pathways to predict CO 2 emissions

“…Moving from empirical analyses based on statistical significance to prediction offers a more solid scientific basis for assessing future levels of emissions, which is highly relevant both from a policy and scholastic perspective. And, in fact, a significant amount of studies have sought to actually predict CO 2 emissions for a global sample, in specific regions, or for individual countries for the future (e.g., Schmalensee, Stoker and Judson, 1998;Auffhammer and Carson, 2008;Van Vuuren and Riahi, 2008;Van Vuuren et al, 2011;Pao and Tsai, 2011;Auffhammer and Steinhauser, 2012;Durante et al, 2012;Kavoosi et al, 2012;Peters et al, 2013;Field et al, 2014;Zhao and Du, 2015;Pérez-Suárez and López-Menéndez, 2015;Le Quéré et al, 2016;Riahi et al, 2017). On one hand, there are those prediction and forecasting studies that are part of the IPCC Assessment Reports, i.e., the RCPs (since 2009) or their predecessor, the Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES; in 2000) (see Nakicenovic et al, 2000;Peters et al, 2013).…”

“…It is therefore not surprising that a considerable body of literature focuses on predicting CO 2 emissions, both within and "outside" the IPCC (e.g., Van Vuuren et al, 2011;Field et al, 2014;Zhao and Du, 2015; Pérez-Suárez and López-Menéndez, 2015;Le Quéré et al, 2016;Riahi et al, 2017). The next section discusses these studies in detail, but it is important to note already here that their results are generally mixed: depending on the underlying assumptions about key predictors, emissions may increase, decrease, or not change much at all until 2100.…”

“…For example, Zhao and Du (2015) mainly focus on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in the post-1997 period and predict that CO 2 emissions will decrease by 25 percent by 2050. Pérez-Suárez and López-Menéndez (2015) analyze a global sample of states and forecast that some countries may increase their emissions until 2020, but others may not. Finally, the arguably most prominent study on emission predictions as it is also part of the last IPCC report, the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), identified four future scenarios for how emissions will develop until 2100.…”

“…Finally, I thoroughly assess the prediction accuracy of the underlying model, which is hardly done in earlier works. Pérez-Suárez and López-Menéndez (2015) or Pao and Tsai (2011) are a few exceptions that explicitly discuss the accuracy of their predictions, but this seems to be the exception rather than the norm. Eventually, I therefore may also contribute to providing a guideline for prediction exercises in general using in-sample and out-of-sample techniques and to the debates on the validity of policies based on empirical models on states' behavior (see, e.g., Choucri and Robinson, 1978;Goldstone et al, 2010;O'Brian, 2010;Carey, 2010, 2011;Ward, Greenhill and Bakke, 2010;Bueno de Mesquita, 2011;Gleditsch and Ward, 2013).…”