Revealing the nexus between nuclear energy and ecological footprint in STIRPAT model of advanced economies: Fresh evidence from novel CS-ARDL model

In recent times, a rise in anthropogenic activities has increased the demand for water, energy, infrastructure, wood, and other natural resources, which causes the climate to change, land to erode, pollution to increase, and biodiversity to decrease. We aim to investigate the impact of nuclear energy and human capital on the ecological footprint in 12 advanced economies over the period 1980–2015. We have applied the novel Cross Sectionally Augmented Auto Regressive Distributive Lag (CS-ARDL) estimation technique that can handle the issue of Cross-Sectional Dependence (CSD) and also deal with the mixture I (0) and I (1) variables. The estimate of nuclear energy is negatively significant, confirming that the use of nuclear energy can protect the environment by preserving the water, land, and forest resources and reducing the carbon footprints. Similarly, the estimated coefficient of human capital is negative and significant, which confirms that human capital can reduce the ecological footprint in advanced economies. On the other side, electricity consumption is a factor that can spur economic activity and consequently the ecological footprints. Likewise, the increased economic activity in advanced economies also exhaust resources like water, land, and forests and consequently increase ecological footprints. The results suggest that nuclear energy can prove a panacea to the problems of energy security and environmental degradation; therefore, increasing nuclear energy production should be part and parcel of energy and environmental policies of all the countries around the globe.