Prioritising sustainability: how economic growth, energy use, forest area, and globalization impact on greenhouse gas emissions and load capacity in Poland?

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the environmental repercussions of a booming economy, fossil fuel, renewable energy, globalisation, technological innovation, and forest cover in Poland from 1990 to 2018. This study used greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and load capacity factor as proxies of ecological damage to provide a comprehensive assessment of the surrounding ecosystem in Poland to help implement future policies to reduce emissions and achieve environmental sustainability. Besides, Poland is the only European Union (EU) country lacking a climate neutrality objective and policy instruments to mitigate ecological concerns. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds model and the Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) procedure evaluated yearly data from 1990 to 2018. The empirical outcomes of the DOLS point out that economic growth and fossil fuel energy use enhance GHG emissions despite reducing the load capacity factor in Poland. Instead, renewable power, globalisation, technological innovation, and forest cover might help to reduce GHG emissions and enhance the load capacity factor in Poland. The concluding thoughts from this study suggest the implementation of policies that support raising additional funding for eco-friendly technology studies while promoting renewable energy use and enhancing forest carbon sinks.

Keywords

• Environmental degradation
• renewable energy
• emission reduction
• Poland
• environmental sustainability