Formulating ecological sustainability policies for India within the coal energy, biomass energy, and economic globalization framework

The betterment of environmental conditions is widely recognized as a significant priority for India, which is a critical aspect of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As an emerging economy, pursuing economic expansion is paramount, requiring significant amount of energy and a degree of openness to other nations. Meanwhile, the nation’s energy demands are heavily met by the usage of biomass and coal energy sources. Furthermore, the nation is part of the top consumer of biomass and coal energy globally. However, over the last 50 years, the level of ecological footprint in India has surged by about 82%, despite the country’s commitment to achieving environmental sustainability, which tends to raise concerns such as: What is the role of India’s major energy sources, biomass, and coal energy, towards ecological sustainability? Does economic globalization promote and hinder India’s environmental sustainability goals? As a result, this current study offers answers to these concerns by investigating the effect of economic globalization, coal energy, and biomass energy on the ecological footprint in India while controlling economic growth. Using the dynamic ARDL to analyze the dataset from 1970 to 2018, the result suggests that biomass energy and economic globalization improve ecological quality. However, economic growth and coal energy impede ecological quality in India. Furthermore, we adopted the time-varying causality test solely to understand the causality analysis, which established that economic globalization, biomass energy, economic growth, and coal energy could forecast the future direction of the ecological footprint.