Delving into Pakistan's industrial economy and carbon mitigation: An effort toward sustainable development goals

Pakistan predominately relies on fossil fuel consumption (almost 84%) to meet its energy demand, which has led to a significant rise in CO2 emissions (CO2Es) and poses an enormous threat to industrial growth. To reduce CO2Es and develop the economy simultaneously, it is necessary to study how to attain a strong decoupling association between impacting factors. Meantime, Pakistan is a transitional economy with significant industrial gaps. Against such backgrounds, this study provides detailed information regarding carbon intensity, energy structure, energy intensity, energy efficiency, worker's effect, economic activity, and industrial scale, which may be essential and beneficial for policymakers. Most existing studies ignored such factors' variations in Pakistan. To fill this gap, focusing on the industrial sector from 1990 onwards, this analysis aims to identify the major driving factors, mainly our focusing the productive sector. This is important because this sector has reached the country's target. The results show that (1) workers' effect, energy intensity, and energy structure factors played a bigger role in rising CO2Es by 133.40 Mt during 1990-2019. (2) The decoupling relationship is an alternating state between five couplings and decoupling. Wherein decoupling states of energy intensity (9.28%), industrial structure (0.39%), and employees' value-added (0.75%) had strong volatility, energy structure (0.22%), and carbon intensity (0.24%) effects were relatively gentle during the period. (3) The average value of employees' value-added remained positive which shows that economic growth negatively impacts the decoupling between CO2Es and the economy. (4) CO2 mitigation rate occurred during 1994, 1997, 2004-06, 2011, and 2013-14, which are inconsistent over the period. The study puts forward some policies to efficiently promote the decoupling between factors based on empirical results.