Big Data-Driven Long Term Accurate CO₂ Emission Forecasting Using Advanced Recurrent Neural Networks

Global climate change driven by carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions necessitates accurate forecasting for effective mitigation strategies. Traditional forecasting models, such as ARIMA and statistical methods, often struggle to handle the non-linear and long-term temporal dependencies in CO2 emission data. This paper evaluates the performance of advanced Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architectures, specifically Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Stacked LSTM, Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) with attention mechanisms, in forecasting long-term CO2 emissions. These models are compared against traditional machine learning algorithms like Random Forest and Gradient Boosted Trees (GBT). The Random Forest and Gradient Boosted Trees, implemented using PySpark framework for distributed computing, are leveraged for efficient big data handling, enabling scalable solutions for CO2 emission forecasting. Our experimental results, using metrics such as Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), show that the Stacked LSTM model achieved the lowest MAE of 25.795, RMSE of 80.678, and MAPE of 1.072, outperforming Random Forest (MAE: 72.4, RMSE: 310.5, MAPE: 1.32) and GBT (MAE: 75.6, RMSE: 356.8, MAPE: 1.57). The findings demonstrate that advanced RNN models, particularly the Stacked LSTM and Bi-LSTM with attention, provide superior performance over traditional models, effectively capturing complex temporal patterns in the data. This study offers valuable insights into CO2 emission forecasting approaches, contributing to the development of accurate tools for climate policy and strategy formulation.