Water, Wealth, and Energy Drive Ecological Footprints in Gulf States, Study Finds

In the blistering heat of the Arabian Peninsula, four small but extraordinarily wealthy economies are quietly testing the limits of what sustainable development means in a water-scarce world. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar—the Gulf Cooperation Council members examined in a new study published in Environmental and Sustainability Indicators—share a combination of environmental challenges found almost nowhere else on Earth: almost no renewable freshwater, near-total dependence on imported food, some of the highest per capita incomes and energy consumption rates globally, and urban populations that in some cases approach one hundred percent. A research team led by Mohammad Ridwan and Harry F. Lee has now untangled how these forces combine to shape the ecological footprint, a measure of the biologically productive land and water area each person’s consumption requires, measured in global hectares per capita.

The study, covering the period from 2000 to 2024, departs from much of the existing environmental literature in a crucial way. Rather than relying on carbon emissions as the sole indicator of environmental degradation, the researchers used the ecological footprint, which captures a far broader range of demands, including land conversion, resource extraction, and waste absorption. This distinction matters particularly in arid, import-dependent economies, where the environmental costs of development extend well beyond the smokestack. The team also chose to examine the four countries as a coherent group rather than subsuming them into a large, heterogeneous international panel, because Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—the two remaining GCC members—lack sufficiently consistent ecological footprint data before 2024 and therefore fell outside the study period.

Methodologically, the analysis is anchored in the STIRPAT framework, a stochastic reformulation of the classic IPAT identity first proposed by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren in 1971 and later refined by Thomas Dietz and Eugene Rosa. STIRPAT holds that environmental impact emerges from the interplay of population, affluence, and technology, but its great strength is flexibility: researchers can add context-specific variables where the empirical setting demands it. Here, the model was augmented with annual freshwater withdrawals, food imports as a share of merchandise imports, government effectiveness and control of corruption from the Worldwide Governance Indicators, and urbanization, alongside the conventional affluence and technology proxies of GDP per capita and energy use, the latter two entered in natural logarithmic form to stabilize their distributions.

The econometric strategy was tailored to the realities of a very small panel—just four countries observed annually over a quarter century. The researchers first confirmed through country-by-country Augmented Dickey–Fuller tests that no variable was integrated beyond first difference, a prerequisite for the Pooled Mean Group ARDL estimator they used to capture average long-run relationships. They then applied the Method of Moments Quantile Regression approach of Machado and Santos Silva, which allows coefficients to vary across the distribution of ecological footprint rather than forcing a single average effect. Robustness checks using Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, panel-corrected standard errors, and feasible generalized least squares, all with year effects, rounded out the design. Missing data—just 25 of 800 cells, or 3.1 percent—were handled by linear interpolation, and re-estimation on the non-imputed sample confirmed the findings were not artifacts of that choice.

The results tell a strikingly consistent story for three variables. Annual freshwater withdrawals, measured in billion cubic meters, carry a positive and significant association with ecological footprint in the long-run model and at the median and upper quantiles of the distribution, with standardized effects rising from 0.544 at the 25th percentile to 0.701 at the 75th. GDP per capita is positive and highly significant across every quantile and every robustness specification, its standardized coefficient climbing from 0.352 to 0.571 as ecological pressure intensifies. Energy use, similarly, is positive and significant throughout, though its effect diminishes slightly at higher quantiles. In a region where cooling demand persists for much of the year, desalinated water production is enormously energy-intensive, and transport networks span vast distances, this triad of water extraction, affluence, and energy consumption forms the backbone of ecological pressure.

Food imports present a more counterintuitive finding. The variable is negatively and significantly associated with ecological footprint across all quantiles and all robustness models, though not in the pooled long-run average. The authors are careful to warn against the tempting but incorrect interpretation that imports simply offload environmental pressure onto exporting nations. Because the Global Footprint Network’s footprint measure is consumption-based, it already incorporates the ecological demand embodied in imported goods. Instead, the negative coefficient more plausibly reflects that in economies where domestic agriculture would require prodigious inputs of water, energy, and land under brutal climatic conditions, sourcing food externally may be associated with less domestic ecological strain than expanding local production—a finding with real implications for food-security strategies across the arid world.

Perhaps the most provocative results concern governance. Government effectiveness, expected to reduce ecological pressure by improving regulatory quality and policy implementation, instead carries a positive and significant coefficient in the long-run model and is statistically insignificant elsewhere. Control of corruption behaves erratically, negative in the long-run specification but positive in several robustness models. Urbanization, anticipated to intensify ecological demand through construction, transport, and cooling, is consistently negative across specifications, though its significance varies. The authors suggest that in already almost fully urbanized societies, additional concentration may bring efficiencies of denser service delivery, and that stronger state capacity in the Gulf may simply execute resource-intensive development more effectively rather than restraining it. Institutional quality, they conclude, does not automatically translate into ecological restraint when the underlying development model remains materially demanding.

The descriptive statistics underline how extreme the setting is. Mean ecological footprint across the sample stands at 8.86 global hectares per capita, with a maximum of 16.43—figures that dwarf global averages. Urbanization averages 92.65 percent of population. Qatar records the highest footprints for most of the period, with pronounced peaks in the late 2000s and early 2010s, while Oman shows the lowest levels and the highest freshwater withdrawals. The Pesaran–Yamagata test rejects slope homogeneity across the four countries, confirming that the drivers of ecological pressure do not operate identically even within this seemingly uniform region, which is precisely why the authors combined distribution-sensitive estimation with multiple robustness checks rather than relying on a single average-effect model.

For policymakers, the message is that environmental strategy in arid, affluent economies should target the channels that matter most: demand management and leakage reduction in water systems, cleaner and more efficient energy provision, and the material intensity of income-linked consumption. Efforts to expand domestic food production deserve careful scrutiny of their water and energy requirements, since ecological sustainability and strategic resilience may not always point to the same policy choices. The authors also stress the limits of their evidence: with only four countries, the findings describe conditional associations rather than proven causal effects, and broad governance indicators cannot identify which specific institutional mechanisms matter. Future work, they suggest, should incorporate desalination intensity, wastewater reuse, cooling demand, and sector-specific governance measures as finer-grained data become available for all six GCC members.

Subject of Research: Determinants of ecological footprint in water-scarce Gulf Cooperation Council economies

Article Title: Ecological footprint in selected GCC economies: The roles of water withdrawals, food imports, governance, urbanization, income, and energy use

Article References: Ridwan, M., Antor, Z. A., Ko, J., Haseeb, M., Khudoykulov, K., & Lee, H. F. (2026). Ecological footprint in selected GCC economies: The roles of water withdrawals, food imports, governance, urbanization, income, and energy use. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101542. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101542

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101542

Keywords: ecological footprint, GCC, water scarcity, food imports, governance, urbanization, energy use, STIRPAT, quantile regression, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar