Bangladesh has recently pledged at the 26th
Conference of Parties (COP26) to reduce its carbon dioxide emission
figures by 22% at the end of 2030. However, since this South Asian
country has always turned to fossil fuels for electricity generation
purposes, achieving this emission reduction goal is a challenging task
for the Bangladesh government. Nevertheless, considering the negative
environmental implications associated with the generation and
consumption of unclean energy, particularly electricity, it is
critically important for Bangladesh to expedite the process of clean
transformation of its traditional pollution-intensive power system.
Hence, the objective of this study is to dissect the repercussions of
hydroelectricity use on Bangladesh’s fossil fuel consumption-related
carbon dioxide As opposed to the traditional method of quantifying
environmental quality using total carbon dioxide emissions, this study
considers Bangladesh’s annual carbon dioxide emissions generated from
the combustion of gas, oil, and coal. Besides, novel Fourier-based
econometric methods that effectively handle structural break problems in
data are utilized in this study. Based on the results, it is found that
up-scaling hydroelectricity consumption levels exert
emission-inhibiting effects while greater economic globalization
activities are witnessed to boost the emissions. More importantly,
hydroelectricity consumption and economic globalization are observed to
jointly curb fossil fuel consumption-based emissions of carbon dioxide.
Additionally, the results verify the environmental Kuznets curve
hypothesis for Bangladesh. Furthermore, financial sector development is
found to be effective in reducing the natural gas consumption-related
carbon dioxide emissions while urbanization is held responsible for
amplifying emissions generated from all three types of fossil fuels.
Therefore, considering these findings, the Bangladesh government needs
to particularly emphasize scaling up production and consumption of
hydroelectricity to decarbonize its economy.