Environmental degradation in geopolitical risk and uncertainty contexts for India: A comparison of ecological footprint, CO2 emissions, and load capacity factor

This study assesses the role of geopolitical risk and uncertainty in the degradation of the environment by forming the functions for ecological footprint, CO₂ emissions, and load capacity factor for the period 1990–2019 in India. Besides, the specified function endogenizes economic growth, renewable energy consumption, and natural resource rent as the additional covariates. The use of the autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) confirms the long-run relationship between study variables. Further, the dynamic simulations of the autoregressive distributed lag model (DYNARDL) outcomes show that geopolitical risk improves the quality of the environment by reducing the ecological footprint and CO₂ emissions. However, it degrades the environment by reducing the load capacity factor. Furthermore, the uncertainty improves the environmental quality by reducing the CO₂ emissions and ecological footprint, but the reduced load capacity factor due to uncertainty implies the degradation of environmental quality in India. Given these findings, the study proposes different environmental conservation policies.