Exploring the Impact of Economic Growth and Energy Consumption on Environmental Pollution in the TR90 Region: An Insight from the MMQR Approach

Governments primarily face the basic conundrums that arise from balancing environmental concerns with economic growth. In this content, since most research focuses on the cases of countries or groups of countries, a significant gap exists in how economic growth and energy consumption influence environmental pollution processes at the regional or provincial level. This study is the first to investigate the effects of energy consumption and economic growth on environmental pollution in the TR90 region of Türkiye (including the provinces of Artvin, Giresun, Gümüşhane, Ordu, Rize, and Trabzon) for the years 2007–2021 in the framework of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. This study utilizes the innovative Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR) approach to investigate these effects. The MMQR results support the EKC hypothesis, which contends that environmental pollution rises in the early stages of economic growth but then declines as growth levels reach a turning point. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that increasing energy consumption exacerbates environmental pollution in the TR90 region.