Modeling the nexus between carbon emissions, urbanization, population growth, energy consumption, and economic development in Asia: Evidence from grey relational analysis

Environmental degradation has been identified as a major worldwide concern in recent decades, with CO2 emissions considered as one of the primary drivers of this catastrophe. This study creatively analyzes the underlying impact of urbanization, population growth, Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, energy use on CO2 emissions to mitigate the environmental degradation from the five most populated regions of Asia i.e., China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. To investigate the integrated impact of CO2 emission and associated factors, a grey relational analysis (GRA) based weights and ranking were estimated for the year 2001 to 2014. Then, utilizing the Conservative minimax approach, we sought to determine which country contributes the most to CO2 emissions based on weights acquired by Second…