The link between urbanization and air pollution in Turkey: evidence from dynamic autoregressive distributed lag simulations

This study investigates the relationship between urbanization and air pollution in Turkey. Dynamic ARDL method was used for the period 1960–2015. According to the findings, there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between long-term urbanization and CO 2 . If urbanization increased by 1%, carbon emissions increased by 0.02%. There is a similar relationship between the shocks that will occur in population growth and CO 2 emission in the long term. However, there is a negative and statistically insignificant relationship between the two variables. In the relationship between GDP and CO 2 , there is a positive relationship in the long term. GDP increase of 1% increases CO 2 emissions by 0.11%. There is a similar relationship between long-term GDP shocks and CO 2 emissions. According to short-term analysis results, energy consumption increases CO 2 emissions by the same rate as GDP. However, the astonishing result of the study emerges here. Empirical results show that a long-term positive shock in energy consumption reduces CO 2 emissions and a negative shock increases pollution. According to these results, Turkey has not reached the point of sustainable growth. For this reason, this developing country needs to make regulatory implementations and determine future policies for these impacts affecting air pollution.