Revisiting the nexus between economic growth and disaggregated greenhouse gases in India: Evidence from necessary and sufficient conditions

For India, achieving environmental sustainability in the midst of faster growth remains a challenging objective. Therefore, we are revisiting the nature of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) at different stages of economic growth through both necessary and sufficient conditions under the cubic model specifications in India. Further, we extend the EKC framework by incorporating energy consumption, agricultural value added, trade, the world uncertainty index, and geopolitical risk as additional variables into the three preferred disaggregated greenhouse gas emission (GHG) models. This study employs an auto-regressive distributed lag model (ARDL). The empirical findings show evidence of the valid N-shaped EKC through both necessary and sufficient conditions for carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O) and exhibit the presence of two real and distinct income turning points for both valid EKCs. In contrast, only the necessary condition supports the N-shaped EKC for methane (CH4) emissions in India. Further, the results highlight that trade has a positive impact, whereas the world uncertainty index has a negative impact on disaggregated GHGs. Similarly, geopolitical risk has a negative effect on CH4 and N2O, whereas energy consumption has a positive impact on CO2 emissions. Moreover, agricultural value added has a negative effect on CH4 and a positive effect on N2O emissions. Our empirical findings suggest policy recommendations that can collectively work as a roadmap for India to become emission-neutral by 2070.