Environmental Sustainability in India

ecological footprint variable in India from 1965 to 2018. In this
context, the impact of renewable energy use, financial development,
urbanization and economic growth on India's ecological footprint is
analyzed. Since all variables were stationary at the first difference,
the cointegration relationship between variables was tested with
Gregory-Hansen and Hatemi-J cointegration tests. Empirical
findings have shown that there is a long-term relationship between
the variables in the relevant period. FMOLS, DOLS, and CCR
estimators were used to determine the direction and magnitude of the
effect of the explanatory variables on the dependent variable. The
estimation results found that while economic growth increased the
ecological footprint the most, financial development decreased the
most. In addition, the increase in urbanization increases
environmental degradation. However, although the use of green
energy is not at the desired level, it increases the environmental
quality. On the other hand, the study tests the EKC hypothesis for
India. Research results support that there is an inverted-u-shaped
relationship between economic growth and ecological footprint.
Therefore, for India, whose GDP is integrated with fossil fuels,
higher growth at the beginning causes more fossil fuel use and
negatively affects environmental quality. On the other hand,
increasing urbanization in India, which has an underdeveloped
energy infrastructure, increases environmental degradation.
However, increasing renewable energy and financial development
offer significant opportunities to reduce the ecological footprint.