Does natural resources depletion and economic growth achieve the carbon neutrality target of the UK? A way forward towards sustainable development

Abstract Environmental sustainability is primarily related to using various natural resources for the economic, energy, and industrial activity. Therefore, it is worthwhile to examine the impact of the natural resource depletion (NRD), energy use (EU), economic growth (EG), population growth (PG) and industrial value added (IVA) on the CO2 emissions during 1970–2019 for the United Kingdom (UK). The study employs a novel environmental sustainability estimation approach employing a dynamic Autoregressive-Distributed-Lag (ARDL) model to analyze the positive and negative shock in short run and in the long run for the selected determinants. Also, Frequency Domain Causality (FDC) has been applied for robustness check. Empirical findings show that EG, IVA and NRD substantially stimulate CO2 emissions in short run, while EU, IVA and PG boost the environmental sustainability in the long run. The FDC outcome also supports the hypothesis of long, medium, and short-run causality. As for policy recommendations, we propose that the UK government should consider these factors by introducing a new long-term environmental strategy to reach the carbon neutrality point.