Decoupling and mitigation potential analysis of CO₂ emissions from Pakistan's transport sector

The transport sector has become one of the major economic, huge fossil fuel energy consumption, and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitting sector of Pakistan. This study applies the logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) and Tapio's decoupling approach to estimate decoupling state and mitigation potential of CO₂ emissions from the transport sector during 1984-2018. LMDI technique is applied to detect the influencing variables (i.e. carbon coefficient, fuel consumption, total energy consumption, and turn over economy), which oversee CO₂ emissions. The outcomes show that CO₂ coefficient effect is the factor which is decreasing CO₂ emissions while economic growth (EG) effect is the factor which is growing CO₂ emissions. The decoupling index is also applied to influencing factors which reflect the EG factors on CO₂ emissions from the transport sector. The consequences confirm that during 1984-2018, the CO₂ emissions show an expensive coupling with EG. Weak decoupling occurred only in the sub-periods 1999-2003, 2004-2008, and 2009-2013. Similarly, the CO₂ emissions occurred from only three decoupling grades. Furthermore, a mitigation model based on the above impacting variables estimates the mitigation rate of CO₂ emissions and showed that the CO₂ mitigation seemed in 1999-2003, 2004-2008, and 2009-2013. Finally, forecasting outcomes of Tapio decoupling index show a weak decoupling during 2018-2030. Therefore, based on the empirical outcomes, this study puts forward a few policy suggestions to efficiently enhance the decoupling between Pakistan's transport CO₂ emissions and EG.