Estimating the relationship between grain crop consumption in Australia and environmental sustainability

Abstract

The ecological footprint methodology permits the monitoring of dominant threats to sustainability. One of the benefits of ecological footprint methodology is its capacity to distinguish between resources consumed and resources available and then reveal how ecologically sustainable those consumption patterns are. The main aim of this paper is to determine the size of the ecological footprint of grains consumption in Australia in order to evaluate the level of environmental sustainability. The paper uses both local and global yield data with inter-temporal timeseries yield factors instead of only global yield. This paper also uses production and consumption data on various grain crops. Results indicate that the ecological footprint of grain consumption in Australia only exceeds biocapacity when the energy requirements of these crops are included in the evaluation. The size of the revealed ecological footprint are responsible for the amount of grain consumption, energy inputs, the size of the population, the degree of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO 2 -e) gas emissions, and the amount of other farm inputs. This paper highlights the environmental significance of the ecological footprint of grain crops consumption in Australia. This paper also reinforces how intensely a sustainable future depends on the reshaping of the Australian grain industry.JEL Classification: Q15, Q51, Q58

Environmental consequence of Australian agricultural trade: An asymmetric analysis

“…The result performs in line with the theoretical expectation as well as supports our hypothesis that improving of ATB (i.e., increase of exports is more than the increase of imports) is environmentally harmful for Australia. This finding supports the findings of Michieka et al (2013), Knight and Schor (2014), Alamdarlo (2016), Rahman and Mamun (2016), Uddin et al (2016), Khan et al (2020), Wahab et al (2020), and (Zaid et al, 2021). However, this finding contrasts with that of Nasir et al (2021).…”

“…We have inspected almost all available literature on Australia and found the flaws and lacunas in those studies that can be noted as: (i). data length is short and annual, thus the data did not leave enough degrees of freedom (Rahman et al, 2022); (ii) data suffers from the aggregation bias and results do not beget any clear decision (Rahman et al (2021); Rahman et al, 2022); (iii) no sector‐segregated data is applied in any research; (iv) results are mixed and ambiguous, and thus misleading (Uddin et al, 2016 and Nasir et al, 2021); (v) results and research technique have a high correlation; (vi) proper and updated econometric techniques were not used; (vii) asymmetric analysis is completely absent in the literature; and (viii) no concentration is found on agricultural trade although agricultural trade contributes a big part in Australian foreign trade.…”

“…Such ambiguity may be raised due to the diversity of data and model specifications, and methodologies used in the study. Rahman & Mamun (2016) and Uddin et al (2016) have assessed the data to check the impact of Australian trade on the environment that has reached in the conclusion that trade has a negative impact on Australian environment. However, Nasir et al (2021) found that Australian trade has no influence on environmental degradation.…”