Acute shortage of energy sources in developing countries in general and South Asian countries in particular has shown that energy has become a binding input for any production process. Nowadays operation of heavy machinery and electrical equipment, and transportation of raw material and final products from their place of origination to their destination require heavy consumption of energy in one form or the other. Therefore, energy consumption that was previously ignored in the production function of a firm and an economy is now considered a vital input in production process. It affects GDP directly as by increasing energy consumption; more output can be produced with given stock of capital and labor force in a country. Also uninterrupted availability of energy at reasonable cost improves competiveness of home products in international markets and thus increases exports of home country a great deal. Resulting increase in net exports further adds to the GDP through multiplier effect

This study examines the relationship among energy use, real gross domestic product, and exports and thereby the impact of energy conservation for the quest of a sustainable environment-gross domestic product growth in the panel of five South Asian countries. The aggregate production function framework is estimated by employing first/second generational panel co-integration-based models for the panel data covering the years 1980–2014. The empirical findings demonstrate a statistically significant panel error correction mechanism among real gross domestic product, capital, labor, and energy use in both export-added and export-excluded models. The findings of panel causality test depict a significant causal relationship running from export and energy use towards gross domestic product in the long run. Furthermore, a significant feedback relationship between energy use and gross domestic product and between exports and gross domestic product has been found in the short run. These findings of vector error correction model-based panel causality test imply that reducing/cutting the extant aggregate energy use (fossil fuel dominant) via conservation policies are somewhat wanting and could be implemented at the cost of lower gross domestic product and export growths, ceteris paribus. Therefore, for reducing the level of carbon emissions arising from fossil fuel-based energy use and for a sustainable aggregate energy use to the production sector per se, there is an immense need of developing environment friendly/green sources of energy in the region. These consolidated and concerted strides of developing and substituting environment friendly energy options into the extant aggregate energy use will, inter alia, ensure the sustainability of environment-gross domestic product growth in South Asia.

Climate change, food security, water scarcity and environmental sustainability have all become major global challenges. As a consequence, improving resource use efficiency is an important aspect of increasing crop productivity. Crop models are increasingly being used as tools for supporting strategic and tactical decision making under varying agro-climatic and socioeconomic conditions. These tools can also support climate change assessment and the evaluation of adaptation strategies to limit the adverse impacts of climate change. In this paper, the authors report on a case study conducted to assess the potential impact of climate change on grain yield in sunflower under arid, semi-arid and subhumid conditions in the Punjab region of Pakistan. Experimental data obtained between 2008 and 2009 were used for model evaluation. The study focused on the impacts of incremental temperature change on sunflower production. The modelling suggests that grain yield could reduce by up to 15% by the 2020s with an average increase in temperature of +1 o C, and by up to 25% if temperatures increased by up to 2 o C for the 2050s. Adaptation strategies showed that, if the crop were sown between 14 days (for 2020) and 21 days (for 2050) earlier than the current date (last week in February), yield losses could potentially be reduced.

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Recently, South Asian countries have committed their mitigation targets to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This study examines the effectiveness of these efforts by developing a dynamic computable general equilibrium-water-energy (CGE-WE) model. Using the GTAP database version 9, it examines how different sectors respond to these policies in South Asia. Besides, it argues that an improved irrigation system can reduce the output losses caused by the mitigation policies. In a nutshell, the cost of improving irrigation system is USD 159.7 million in Bangladesh, 224 million in India, 9.1 million in Nepal, 38.5 million in Pakistan and 10.4 million in Sri Lanka. The proposed adaptation strategy can save more than USD 76.43 billion in the region after fulfilling the region’s commitment toward the global mitigation efforts.