Sustainable food production, forest biodiversity and mineral pricing: Interconnected global issues

Highlights

• To critically analyzed global performance for attaining United Nation SDG-12.

• Sustainable food production, forest biodiversity, and mineral pricing are the global concern area of investigation.

• The study used FMOLS, DOLS, CCR, and ARDL estimators for robust inferences.

• Forest biodiversity, food production, mineral rents, and energy demand increases global carbon emissions.

• EKC hypothesis, food and energy associated emissions, and carbon biodiversity is verified in the global data set.

Abstract

The food production challenges for growing population are the global issue that is highly proliferated in the United Nation Sustainable development Goal (SDG-12) with responsible consumption and production. The goal further emphasized the need to reduce global food waste at retailers, consumers, production, and supply chains level by 2030. This study is in line with the SDG-12 to analyze the relationship between sustainable food production, forest biodiversity, and mineral pricing by using world aggregated data for a period of 1970–2018. The study used different cointegrating regressions, including Fully Modified OLS (FMOLS), Dynamic OLS (DOLS), Canonical Cointegrating Regression (CCR) and ARDL-Bounds testing approach for robust inferences. The results show that forest biodiversity increases carbon emissions due to inadequate land use planning and animal rich biodiversity, while food production is merely carbon associated that supported ‘food production footprints’ at global scale. Mineral rents and energy demand both increases carbon emissions that substantiate the ‘mineral resource curse’ hypothesis and energy associated global emissions. Although the result is not supported the ‘pollution haven’ hypothesis and population associated emissions, however, there is a strong evidence of ‘race-to-the-bottom’ hypothesis at global scale. The simulation results suggested that forest biodiversity, food prices, mineral rents, population density, and combustibles and renewables waste will negatively affect the global environment in the form of high mass carbon emissions that sabotaged the United Nation sustainable development agenda. The study emphasized the need to adopt sustainable policy instruments, including advancement in the clean energy resources, cleaner production technologies, sustainable resource management, and conservation of forest biodiversity, which will be helpful to reduce carbon abatement costs at worldwide.

Introduction

The United Nation SDGs largely emphasized the need to set the national targets to lowering the global carbon emissions stocks through sustainable production and consumption. In this regard, the United Nation SDG-12 is designed to meet the global standards of environmental sustainability by reducing global food waste, sustainable and efficiently natural resources management, efficient waste recycling and its reuse, improve production technologies and supply chains system, integrate and coordinate sustainability information, promote sustainable procurement practices, improve scientific and technical capabilities, lowering fossil fuel subsidies, and restructuring carbon pricing (United Nation, 2015).

The earlier literature is well documented on sustainable food production while it's limited with few economic and environmental factors, including, sustainable investment in agriculture production system (Herrero et al., 2010; Garnett et al., 2013), land use change and biodiversity loss (Smith and Gregory, 2013), aviation related emissions (Foster et al., 2007), dietary change habits (Tait et al., 2016), food prices and environmental products labeling (Hoek et al., 2017), global bioenergy demand (Manning et al., 2015), etc, while a very few scholarly work studied food pricing, mineral resource rents tax, forest biodiversity, financial liberalization, and population density in a given connection of sustainable food production system, which is the novel contribution of the current study, which is overlooked in to the earlier scholarly work.

The current literature is presented in a given context for the ready reference, i.e., Hishan et al. (2019) concluded that responsible food production and consumption, access to electricity, green financing, and sustainable technologies are imperative to achieve United Nation SDGs in the context of Sub-Saharan African countries. Aldakhil et al. (2018) considered a heterogonous panel of 19 selected countries for a period of 1990–2016 and evaluated the healthcare sustainability agenda, which is linked with the number of socio-economic and environmental factors. The results show that high consumption of food-beverage-tobacco is interlinked with multiple healthcare diseases via a main route of high carbon emissions, which is required a devise strong environmental and healthcare policies to conserve natural environment. Rasli et al. (2018) argued that industrial intensification, food production, energy demand, and trade liberalization policies harmful for the environmental sustainability agenda that need green policy instruments to mitigate toxic air pollutants across developed and developing countries. Govindan (2018) concluded that sustainability in the food production system is highly affected by the globalization and growing world population, which raises a serious concern of sustainability in the food supply chains, further it increases the complexity in the food transportation, processing, and consumption, which highly increases food waste globally. Thus, sustainability in the achievement of food supply chains process is vital to limit global carbon emissions stocks. Dahiya et al. (2018) presented the solution for conservation of global food waste and emphasized the need of food waste biorefinery platform that would helpful to fabricated different sustainable bio based products and its facilitate maximum recovery of food resources. Garcia-Herrero et al. (2018) discussed the need of reducing food losses and identified a main source for meeting food security challenges through effective and sustainable food supply chain process, which would substantial be improved both in terms of nutritional elements and cost effectiveness. Duman et al. (2018) suggested that there will be an incentive to re-use food waste for production of sustainable hydrogen that contained about 90% water. Thus, thermochemical process could be utilized in a way to recycle food waste to produce sustainable hydrogen energy. Bhuiyan et al. (2018a) found that GHG and sulfur emissions damages biodiversity index to decline while trade and carbon emissions affect potential habitat area across countries. Thus, the environmental sustainability is largely affected by different high toxic air pollutants worldwide. Bhuiyan et al. (2018b) further pointed out the multifaceted factors that negatively affect biodiversity, including high population growth, energy demand, climate change, foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows and country's income per capita. The study concluded that Asian countries need to pay serious attention on their biodiversity loss to prevent it from natural disasters. Qureshi et al. (2019a) examined the environmental impacts on international tourism in 35 tourists induced countries by using a time series data from 1995 to 2016 and found that international tourism negatively affect carbon mitigation agenda, which need to re-correct with eco-friendly tourism policies across countries. Batool et al. (2019) considered a case study of South Korean economy to evaluate the country's green technology agenda to reduce carbon emissions by using a time series data from 1973 to 2016. The results are generally in favor that green ICTs infrastructure substantially achieved carbon mitigating agenda, which is vital sign for sustainable recovery of country's environmental resources. Rehman et al. (2019) discussed the viability of sustainable agriculture production in the context of Pakistan by using a time series data from 1987 to 2017. The results show that agriculture mechanization, energy demand, and fertilizer off take largely increases carbon emissions, while improved seed distribution and total food grains reduced carbon emissions stocks in a country.

The focal question is how we may achieve sustainability in food production at global scale. For this purpose, we proposed the following set of research questions that need to be answered, i.e., the first research question is: does forest biodiversity would be helpful to mitigate carbon emissions stock ((through photosynthesis (Calvin cycle) and by establishing and expanding range land))? This question is important to devise strong policy options in order to sustained forest biodiversity with appropriate land use changes. The second research question is: does sustainable food production, food prices, and mineral resource rents tax is helpful to limit carbon emissions? This question reveals that responsible food production and consumption with appropriate carbon pricing is vital for progressing to achieve global environmental sustainability agenda. The final question is: does energy demand, financial liberalization policies, and high population density deteriorate global environment? This question emphasized the need to progress in the cleaner production technologies, green financing, and smart urbanization that would helpful to limit global carbon emissions stocks. These questions required empirical analysis for answered the stated queries accordingly.

The contribution of the study is to amalgamate different socio-economic and environmental factors in pursuing the United Nation environmental sustainability development goals (SDGs) related with achieving global sustainable food production (SDG-12), conservation of forest biodiversity (SDG-15), and integrate climate change measures through carbon pricing (SDG-13). The sustainable and efficient use of natural resources, substantial reduction in food waste, halt deforestation and biodiversity loss, and integrate national and international policies to combat climate change are the paramount concern of the United Nation that have to be respond with formulating global sustainable policies by 2030. The earlier literature is mainly focused on food associated emissions due to unsustainable production and consumption (Jones et al., 2019; Hishan et al., 2019; Schröder et al., 2019 etc), forest biodiversity loss (Bhuiyan et al. 2018a; Hisano et al., 2018; Walsh et al., 2019, etc), and carbon pricing (Boyce, 2018; Li et al., 2018, etc), however, there is no single study is available, as authors believe, that combined all three stated factors in a single study at global scale. The study further included waste, energy demand, FDI inflows, population density, and economic growth to evaluate waste emissions, pollution haven hypothesis (PHH), environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), energy associated emissions, and population associated emissions, which is previously not evaluated at global scale for robust inferences. The imposition of carbon tax on food production and mineral resource extraction is the new policy dimension that is helpful to reduce carbon abatement cost and tackle climate change issues at global scale.

The objectives of the study is in line with the stated research questions, i.e.,

• To examine the impact of forest biodiversity, food production, food pricing, and mineral resource rents tax on carbon emissions in the world aggregate data set.

• To investigate the EKC hypothesis, PHH, population associated emissions, energy emissions, and waste emissions at global scale, and

• To determine the forecast relationship between the stated variables for the next 10 years time period.

The study needs time series cointegration technique to achieve its stated objectives of the study.