Do Natural Disasters, Fossil Fuels, and Renewable Energy Affect CO2 Emissions and the Ecological Footprint?

Climate change is a global concern driven by increasing pollution through rising CO2 emissions and growing ecological footprint from human activities. This research investigates how environmental quality (proxied by CO2 emissions and ecological footprint) in Indonesia is affected by multiple factors, including natural disasters, fossil fuels, renewable energy consumption, economic growth, and capital formation from 1965 to 2022. The analysis employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model, with robustness ensured using Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS), followed by Granger causality tests to examine dynamic relationships between variables. The findings show that natural disasters, fossil fuel consumption, and economic growth contribute to increasing CO2 emissions in the long run, while renewable energy consumption helps reduce them. Natural disasters exhibit a negative but insignificant impact on the ecological footprint. Economic growth increases the ecological footprint, whereas capital formation helps reduce it in the long run. In the short run, fossil fuels are found to increase CO2 emissions, while renewable energy reduces them. Natural disasters are found to increase the ecological footprint. Additionally, the Granger causality test confirms a unidirectional relationship from both natural disasters and economic growth to environmental quality. This study recommends that Indonesia implement integrated strategies focused on accelerating green energy adoption and enhancing disaster resilience to achieve environmental quality.