Building a greener environment: education levels and their links to CO₂ reduction

ABSTRACT

Exploring the factors affecting CO₂ emissions is important for governments and policymakers to control the increasing trend of CO₂ emissions. Although many factors have been studied by researchers, education as a potential factor did not attract their attention. Thus, this study focuses on education levels as a new perspective to examine how education levels can contribute to CO₂ emission reductions in the USA. Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) was conducted, using relevant factors, such as: Gross Domestic Product (GDP), total primary energy consumption (EC), elementary school enrolment ratio (EER), high school enrolment ratio (HER), and college enrolment ratio (CER). The results reveal that GDP and EC have positive and significant effects on CO₂ emissions in the short- and long-run. The effects of the three education levels are significant and negative in the long-run, while in the short-run only the coefficient of CER is significant. This study confirms a significant link between education levels and CO₂ emissions reduction in the long-run, and hopes to provide insight for governments and policymakers that investing on education levels, prioritizes the environmental awareness and leads to a more environmentally conscious society.

KEYWORDS:

• CO₂ emissions
• education
• climate change
• sustainable development
• autoregressive distributed lag model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The datasets analysed during the current study are publicly available in the ‘The U.S. Census Bureau’ and ‘World Bank Data’ repositories, https://www.census.gov Accessed 22 January 2023 and https://data.worldbank.org/ Accessed 22 January 2023.