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The Science of The Total Environment

The transport sector has become one of the major economic, huge fossil fuel energy consumption, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emitting sector of Pakistan. This study applies the logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) and Tapio's decoupling approach to estimate decoupling state and mitigation potential of CO2 emissions from the transport sector during 1984–2018. LMDI technique is applied to detect the influencing variables (i.e. carbon coefficient, fuel consumption, total energy consumption, and turn over economy), which oversee CO2 emissions. The outcomes show that CO2 coefficient effect is the factor which is decreasing CO2 emissions while economic growth (EG) effect is the factor which is growing CO2 emissions. The decoupling index is also applied to influencing factors which reflect the EG factors on CO2 emissions from the transport sector. The consequences confirm that during 1984–2018, the CO2 emissions show an expensive coupling with EG. Weak decoupling occurred only in the sub-periods 1999–2003, 2004–2008, and 2009–2013. Similarly, the CO2 emissions occurred from only three decoupling grades. Furthermore, a mitigation model based on the above impacting variables estimates the mitigation rate of CO2 emissions and showed that the CO2 mitigation seemed in 1999–2003, 2004–2008, and 2009–2013. Finally, forecasting outcomes of Tapio decoupling index show a weak decoupling during 2018–2030. Therefore, based on the empirical outcomes, this study puts forward a few policy suggestions to efficiently enhance the decoupling between Pakistan's transport CO2 emissions and EG.

Decoupling and mitigation potential analysis of CO2 emissions from Pakistan's transport sector