Globalization Cuts India’s Ecological Footprint While Resource Depletion Drives It Up, Study Finds

India’s ecological footprint has been shaped by opposing forces over nearly three decades of economic opening, according to a new time-series study that finds globalization and urbanization working to shrink the country’s environmental burden while natural resource depletion, economic growth and even renewable energy consumption push it larger. The research, published in the journal Green Technology, Resilience, and Sustainability, analyzes data from the post-reform period of 1990 to 2018 and applies both linear and nonlinear econometric models to capture effects that conventional methods miss.

The study, led by Haider Hassan Itoo with co-authors including J. C. Sharmiladevi, Javaid Iqbal Khan, Gawher Ahmad Bhat and Amedee Havyarimana, uses the ecological footprint, measured in global hectares, as its central indicator of environmental degradation. Unlike carbon dioxide emissions alone, which the authors note account for roughly 70 percent of India’s total greenhouse gas emissions but do not capture the full picture, the ecological footprint spans six components: carbon, cropland, fishing grounds, grazing land, forest products and built-up land. It represents the productive land and water area required to support resource consumption and absorb waste, making it a broader measure of the pressure human activity places on the environment.

To model the relationships among globalization, natural resource depletion, renewable energy consumption, economic growth and urbanization, the researchers drew all of their data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database. Globalization was proxied by the trade intensity ratio, natural resource depletion by total natural resource rents as a percentage of GDP, renewable energy consumption by the share of renewables in total energy consumption, economic growth by GDP at market prices, and urbanization by the growth rate of the urban population. The analysis was carried out in EViews-10 over the 1990 to 2018 window.

Methodologically, the study’s distinguishing feature is its use of the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag, or NARDL, framework alongside the standard linear ARDL approach. The nonlinear variant decomposes changes in the explanatory variables into partial sums of positive and negative movements, allowing the model to estimate whether increases and decreases in globalization or resource depletion have different effects on the ecological footprint. Before estimation, the authors verified with Augmented Dickey-Fuller and Phillips-Perron unit root tests that all variables were stationary after first difference and contained no second-order integration, a prerequisite for the bounds testing approach. The F-bounds tests for both the symmetric and asymmetric models produced statistics exceeding the upper critical bounds at all significance levels, confirming a stable long-run equilibrium relationship among the variables.

The asymmetric long-run results reveal a striking symmetry in the resource effect: a positive shock to natural resource depletion increases the ecological footprint by 0.01 percent, while a negative shock decreases it by the same magnitude. The authors attribute this to rising demand for natural resources driving greater ecological pressure in India. This finding aligns with prior studies, including work by Hassan and colleagues and Ahmad and colleagues, which documented a positive association between natural resource depletion and ecological footprints, although other research has reported the opposite relationship in different contexts.

Globalization produced the study’s most counterintuitive result. A positive shock to globalization reduces the ecological footprint by 0.17 percent, while a negative shock increases it by the same amount, indicating an inverse relationship that holds regardless of the direction of change. The authors interpret this as evidence that globalization is playing a pivotal role in improving environmental quality in India, potentially through the diffusion of eco-innovations, eco-products, bio-fuels and cleaner production practices that have accompanied the integration of world economies since the 1991 economic reforms. This contrasts with some earlier international studies, including Shahbaz and colleagues’ analysis of 25 developed countries from 1970 to 2014, which found that globalization increased carbon emissions.

Perhaps the most policy-relevant surprise concerns renewable energy. Both the asymmetric and symmetric models find that renewable energy consumption increases ecological pressure rather than relieving it. In the symmetric long-run estimates, a unit percentage change in renewable energy consumption raises the ecological footprint by 0.003 percent, while economic growth raises it by 0.179 percent and natural resource depletion by 0.006 percent. The authors caution that renewable energy expansion alone may not immediately reduce ecological pressure without parallel gains in efficiency, infrastructure and technology, a result they connect to India’s Nationally Determined Contributions and its renewable energy expansion goals reaffirmed at COP26 in Glasgow and COP28 in Dubai.

Urbanization emerges as a mitigating force. In the symmetric long-run model, a one percent change in urbanization reduces the ecological footprint by 0.09 percent, and the coefficient is negative and significant in the short-run asymmetric results as well. The authors suggest that urbanization can lessen environmental degradation through improved infrastructure efficiency and sustainable urban development, a finding they link to the importance of public transport, green buildings and smart-city initiatives consistent with Sustainable Development Goal 11.

The short-run asymmetric results are broadly consistent with the long-run picture, though the dynamics differ in detail: a positive shock to natural resource depletion raises the ecological footprint by 0.008 percent, while a negative shock raises it by 0.02 percent in one specification and decreases it by 0.09 percent in another. The error correction term is negative and statistically significant, indicating that deviations from long-run equilibrium are corrected rapidly, with the authors reporting a correction coefficient of 140 percent in the following period. Diagnostic tests support the reliability of the estimates: the serial correlation test yields a p-value of 0.219 and the Breusch-Pagan-Godfrey heteroscedasticity test a p-value of 0.587, both failing to reject their respective null hypotheses of well-behaved residuals, while CUSUM and CUSUMSQ tests confirm parameter stability throughout the sample period.

The authors frame their findings against India’s international commitments, including the Paris Agreement of 2015, the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the net-zero emissions target committed for 2070. They recommend resource-efficient and circular economy policies aligned with SDG 12, deeper engagement with green-oriented globalization through environmentally responsible foreign investment and green technology transfer, and qualitative improvements in the energy transition including energy efficiency, storage technologies and grid modernization. The study’s scope is limited to national-level time-series data for a single country over 29 years, and the authors themselves point to future research directions including disaggregated measures of globalization, alternative environmental indicators such as material footprint and biodiversity loss, state-level analysis within India, and comparative panel studies across emerging economies.

Subject of Research: Asymmetric effects of globalization and natural resource depletion on ecological footprints in post-reform India

Article Title: Globalization, natural resource asymmetries, and environmental sustainability: evidence from ecological footprints in post-reform India

Article References: Itoo, H. H., Sharmiladevi, J. C., Khan, J. I., Bhat, G. A., & Havyarimana, A. (2026). Globalization, natural resource asymmetries, and environmental sustainability: evidence from ecological footprints in post-reform India. Green Technology, Resilience, and Sustainability, 6(1), Article 15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44173-026-00038-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44173-026-00038-8

Keywords: ecological footprint, India, globalization, natural resource depletion, NARDL, ARDL, renewable energy, urbanization, environmental sustainability, time-series analysis, economic growth, World Development Indicators