Does agricultural ecosystem cause environmental pollution in Pakistan? Promise and menace

The increasing trend of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) is the main cause of harmful anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, which may result in environmental pollution, global warming, and climate change. These issues are expected to adversely affect the agricultural ecosystem and well-being of the society. In order to minimize food insecurity and prevent hunger, a timely adaptation is desirable to reduce potential losses and to seek alternatives for promoting a global knowledge system for agricultural sustainability. This paper examines the causal relationship between agricultural ecosystem and CO₂ emissions as an environmental pollution indicator in Pakistan from the period 1972 to 2014 by employing Johansen cointegration, autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, and Granger causality approach. The Johansen cointegration results show that there is a significant long-run relationship between the agricultural ecosystem and the CO₂ emissions. The long-run relationship shows that a 1% increase in biomass burned crop residues, emissions of CO₂ equivalent of nitrous oxide (N₂O) from synthetic fertilizers, stock of livestock, agricultural machinery, cereal production, and other crop productions will increase CO₂ emissions by 1.29, 0.05, 0.45, 0.05, 0.03, and 0.65%, respectively. Further, our finding detects that there is a bidirectional causality of CO₂ emissions with rice area paddy harvested, cereal production, and other crop productions. The impulse response function analysis displays that biomass-burned crop residues, stock of livestock, agriculture machinery, cereal production, and other crop productions are significantly contributing to CO₂ emissions in Pakistan.