The role of nuclear energy consumption in abatement of ecological footprint: Novel insights from quantile-on-quantile regression

The growing climate change debate necessitates a shift towards usage of clean energy in economic activities of developing and developed countries. However, existing studies are skeptical to consider nuclear energy as clean energy in primary energy-mix. This context addresses a question of whether top nuclear energy-consuming economies (i.e. Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Russia, and USA) have same or differential ecological footprints. This question addressed here is not yet studied, motivating us to examine the impact of nuclear energy consumption on ecological footprint in nine nuclear energy-consuming countries. This study uses novel Quantile-on-Quantile Regression (QQR) method to perform the country-specific analysis using the time series data from 1995 to 2016. The empirical findings highlight asymmetric effects of nuclear energy consumption on ecological footprints. The results evidence a strong negative impact of nuclear energy on ecological footprints for USA, Sweden, and Canada across most of the quantiles. This implies that these economies are capable of reducing their ecological footprints because of relying on nuclear energy usage. We also find that South Korea, Russia, and Japan produce the mixed impacts (positive and negative) of nuclear energy consumption on ecological footprints across most of the quantiles. Surprisingly, nuclear energy consumption fuels ecological footprints for Germany, China and France across most of the quantiles, which indicates that these countries fail to protect the health of natural environment due to nuclear energy consumption.