Fossil Fuels, Hydroelectricity and Environmental Degradation in Colombia: An Asymmetric Analysis

Energy use remains central to Colombia’s economic growth, yet its composition shapes the scale and direction of environmental outcomes. This study investigates how coal, oil, and hydroelectricity influence ecological degradation within the context of economic growth. The study applies cross-quantilogram and bootstrap Fourier Granger causality techniques to capture directional dependence and predictive causality across different quantiles, respectively. The findings show that the relationships are heterogeneous rather than uniform across the distribution. Economic growth exhibits a predominantly negative dependence on ecological footprint, suggesting that higher output is associated with lower ecological pressure under several environmental states. Hydroelectricity also shows a largely negative dependence, indicating its general contribution to environmental sustainability, although this effect weakens under extreme conditions. By contrast, the effects of coal and oil are more conditional and vary across quantiles, reflecting the complex role of fossil fuels in Colombia’s environmental dynamics. The bootstrap Fourier Granger causality results further reveal that causality is not constant across the distribution, but emerges only at specific quantiles. The central policy implication from this result lies in adopting an adaptive environmental strategy in which preventive measures dominate under low degradation, green-supportive policies are emphasized under moderate degradation, and stronger corrective interventions are implemented under high ecological stress.