The role of forest and agriculture towards environmental fortification: designing a sustainable policy framework for top forested countries

Climate change has been a concern in the public sphere throughout the decades. Also, a constant change in climate as a result of geologic history is posing a global problem. Many earlier studies have focused on various factors; however, this study intends to contribute distinctly; therefore, we select 22 countries among the top 30 forested countries in the world declared by CEO-WORLD in 2020. The study explores the relationship between energy consumption, agricultural value-added, agricultural land, forest area, and real GDP with CO2 emissions from 1980 to 2019. For analysis, we account for heterogeneity in the cross sections by developing a novel panel nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model in order to capture within-group variations, which is the panel data form of the Shin et al. (2014) model. The Pesaran 2007, CADF and CIPS panel unit root testing results indicate that the investigated variables are stationary at their first differences. The empirical finding shows positive and negative shocks in electricity consumption and agricultural land have a favourable and statistically significant long-term effect on CO2 emissions. Positive shocks in agricultural value-added and forest areas have a significant adverse influence on environmental degradation, while negative shocks have a substantial long-term positive effect on CO2 emissions. Positive shock in real GDP is insignificant, whereas negative shock shows adverse and substantial long-term impacts on CO2 emissions. This research's contributions will help policymakers evaluate energy needs and implement clean energy; combating deforestation will help reduce CO2 emissions and improve the quality of the environment and climate change.