Population Growth and Environmental Degradation in Pakistan: a Causality Analysis

This paper has empirically analyzed the casual relationship between population growth and environmental degradation in case of Pakistan using time-series data from 1970 to 2010. Granger causality is employed for empirical assessment and the empirical findings reveal causal relationship between population growth and environmental degradation, indeed all the components of environment degradation like air degradation (AD), land degradation (LD) and water degradation (WD) are also mutually causing each other indicating multivariate causality. All of these findings imply that population growth is a major factor responsible for environmental degradation in Pakistan which imposes a burden on country’s limited resources. High fertility rate disrupted nature resources through increase in production and consumption level, improper industrial waste dumping and degradation of land resources etc. There is need of proper attention and government should adopt special policy in order to conserve environmental resources for future generation.