Exploring Causality and Impact between Romanian Urban Real Estate Developing and Green Spaces

The real estate sector has experienced rapid growth in all developed and developing countries in recent decades, sometimes with year-on-year percentage changes exceeding 2 digits. However, today, the rapid growth in recent years must also consider the objectives of sustainability and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by introducing as many green spaces as possible. Thus, omitting the inclusion of these components results in the acceleration of global warming. The main objective of the research is to identify the positive or negative impact of real estate development on green spaces, focusing on two indicators: the number of private homes in urban areas at the end of the year and the surface area of green spaces in urban environments. For both indicators, the time component is between 1996-2023, and the data are taken for each county in Romania. In the analysis, the data is normalized and described to understand the context of their evolution. Statistical tests, such as the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test, determine the stationarity of the time series. The Akaike Information Criterion test identifies the optimal number of lags, through which the causality between the two indicators is tested using Granger causality. Along with the main objective, the research presents previous studies to understand whether the integration of green spaces with real estate development is considered.