Influencing factors of carbon emissions and their trends in China and India: a machine learning method.

China and India are the largest coal consumers and the most populated countries in the world. With industrial and population growth, the need for energy has increased, which has inevitably led to an increase in carbon dioxide (CO ₂ ) emissions because both countries depend on fossil fuel consumption. This paper investigates the impact of energy consumption, financial development (FD), gross domestic product (GDP), population, and renewable energy on CO ₂ emissions. The study applies the long short-term memory (LSTM) method, a novel machine learning (ML) approach, to examine which influencing driver has the greatest and smallest impact on CO ₂ emissions; correspondingly, this study builds a model for CO ₂ emission reduction. Data collected between 1990 and 2014 were analyzed, and the results indicated that energy consumption had the greatest effect and renewable energy had the smallest impact on CO ₂ emissions in both countries. Subsequently, we increased the renewable energy coefficient by one and decreased the energy consumption coefficient by one while keeping all other factors constant, and the results predicted with the LSTM model confirmed the significant reduction in CO ₂ emissions. Finally, this study forecasted a CO ₂ emission trend, with a slowdown predicted in China by 2022; however, CO ₂ emission's reduction is not possible in India until 2023. These results suggest that shifting from nonrenewable to renewable sources and lowering coal consumption can reduce CO ₂ emissions without harming economic development.
(© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)