Turkey’s Farms Defy the Environmental Kuznets Curve as Growth Lifts Agricultural Emissions

Turkey is one of Europe’s agricultural powerhouses, ranking first in the continent’s agricultural economy and tenth globally in 2022, with the sector contributing 58.5 billion US dollars to national income and employing roughly 18 percent of the working population. Yet a new econometric study suggests that the country’s development model may be quietly working against its climate goals. Researchers Sefa Özbek and Bahar Özbek of Tarsus University analyzed more than three decades of Turkish data and found that, in the long run, economic growth does not clean up agriculture’s greenhouse gas footprint. Instead, it deepens it, overturning one of the most widely used assumptions in environmental economics.

The study, published in Discover Agriculture, examines the structural drivers of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in Turkey from 1990 to 2021, a period spanning the country’s financial liberalization, deepening globalization, rapid technological investment, and expanding renewable energy capacity. Rather than treating agriculture in isolation, the authors model emissions as the outcome of an interconnected transformation process involving economic growth, financial development, renewable energy consumption, technological innovation, and globalization. Their central finding is striking: the relationship between income and agricultural emissions follows a U-shaped curve in the long term, not the classic inverted U-shape predicted by the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve has long underpinned policy optimism, holding that environmental degradation rises during early development but falls once societies grow wealthy enough to demand cleaner technologies and stronger regulation. The Turkish data tell a different story for agriculture. Below a turning point estimated at roughly 5,430 US dollars of per capita income in constant 2015 dollars, growth was associated with falling agricultural emissions, likely reflecting productivity gains and structural adjustment. But once that threshold was crossed, a milestone Turkey surpassed in the mid-1990s, further economic expansion became coupled with rising emissions, driven by intensifying food demand, mechanization, irrigation, livestock expansion, and heavier use of energy- and chemical-intensive inputs.

Methodologically, the study is notable for how it handles Turkey’s turbulent recent history. The 1994 currency crisis, the financial collapse of 2000 and 2001, and successive structural reforms all left marks on the country’s economic time series, and conventional unit root tests that ignore such breaks can produce misleading results. The authors therefore employed the fractional frequency Fourier Augmented Dickey-Fuller test, which uses sine and cosine functions to capture both sharp and gradual structural changes, alongside traditional ADF and Phillips-Perron tests. For the long-run estimates, they applied a Fourier-augmented autoregressive distributed lag approach, cross-checked with fully modified and canonical cointegrating regression estimators.

The Fourier components proved statistically significant, with an estimated fractional frequency of 2.42 indicating that the structural breaks embedded in Turkey’s development path are permanent rather than temporary. The error correction coefficient of -0.92 showed that short-term deviations from the long-run equilibrium are corrected rapidly, with roughly 92 percent of any imbalance eliminated within a single period. Diagnostic tests confirmed the absence of autocorrelation, heteroskedasticity, and model misspecification, and cumulative sum stability checks confirmed that the estimated coefficients remained stable across the sample.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive results concern renewable energy and technology. Both variables showed positive long-term relationships with agricultural emissions, meaning that the expansion of clean energy in the wider Turkish economy and the growth of patent activity have not translated into lower emissions from farming. The authors caution against reading these coefficients as direct causal effects. The renewable energy indicator measures the share of renewables in total final energy consumption economy-wide, not within agriculture, and total patent applications do not distinguish green or agricultural innovations from inventions in other sectors. The likely explanation is indirect: greater energy availability can stimulate irrigation, mechanization, processing, and land-use changes that expand production and offset emission savings.

Financial development told a similar story. According to the robustness estimates, a one percent increase in the financial development index was associated with approximately a 0.17 percent rise in agricultural emissions, suggesting that easier access to credit and a wider array of financial instruments fuel production expansion rather than environmental improvement. The finding aligns with a growing body of international evidence showing that finance, when not steered by environmental criteria, tends to amplify emission-intensive activity. The authors argue that this makes a case for green credit mechanisms and environmental quality conditions attached to agricultural lending.

Globalization emerged as the lone bright spot. In both the short and long term, increases in the KOF Globalization Index were associated with lower agricultural emissions, with the long-run coefficient implying that a one percent rise in globalization corresponds to roughly a one percent decline. The authors attribute this to the disciplining force of international markets: Turkey exports approximately half of its goods to European Union countries, whose emission standards and sustainability requirements push producers toward cleaner practices. Compliance with international environmental norms, they suggest, acts as a balancing factor that domestic growth dynamics alone fail to provide.

The broader implications reach well beyond Turkey. Roughly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions originate from agriculture and food systems, and with the world population projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, pressure on farmland, water, and inputs will only intensify. The Turkish results suggest that for developing economies, growth alone will not deliver a low-carbon agricultural transition, and that finance, energy, and technology policies must be explicitly aligned with emission reduction targets. The authors recommend carbon pricing in agriculture, incentives for low-emission production, precision agriculture support, green patent programs, and renewable energy projects that deliver measurable on-farm reductions, such as energy-efficient irrigation and low-carbon machinery.

The study’s authors are candid about its limitations. The model does not directly include biophysical determinants such as fertilizer application, livestock density, land-use change, or climate variability, so the estimated relationships should be read as long-run associations rather than definitive causal effects. The patent and renewable energy indicators capture economy-wide activity rather than sector-specific innovation. Future research, they suggest, could extend the sample back to 1980, incorporate regional and farm-level data, apply asymmetric estimators, or compare Turkey with structurally similar economies in the European Union. But the core message stands: without deliberate sustainability policies, the engines of modern development may reproduce, rather than resolve, agriculture’s climate problem.

Subject of Research: Structural economic drivers of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in Turkey

Article Title: Rethinking agricultural sustainability in Turkey: structural drivers of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions

Article References: Özbek, S., & Özbek, B. (2026). Rethinking agricultural sustainability in Turkey: structural drivers of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Discover Agriculture, 4(1), Article 302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44279-026-00776-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44279-026-00776-0

Keywords: agricultural emissions, greenhouse gases, Environmental Kuznets Curve, Turkey, financial development, renewable energy, technological innovation, globalization, econometrics, sustainable agriculture, climate change, low-carbon transition