Assessing Environmental Policy Impact through the Ecological Footprint: The Case of Türkiye

This study investigates the long-term effectiveness of environmental policies in Türkiye by examining the stochastic properties of the ecological footprint (EF) and its six subcomponents, carbon footprint, cropland footprint, grazing land footprint, forest products footprint, fishing grounds footprint, and built-up land footprint over the period 1961–2022. Annual per capita data obtained from the Global Footprint Network are analyzed using two-unit root testing methodologies: the conventional Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test and the more robust RALS-LM unit root test, which accounts for structural breaks and non-normal error distributions. The findings reveal that both the EF and its largest component, the CF, are stationary, suggesting that past environmental policy interventions have yielded transitory effects. Only the CRF and FGF exhibit nonstationarity, indicating that agricultural and fisheries-related policies may have induced permanent shifts in environmental outcomes. Overall, the results suggest that environmental policies in Türkiye to date have not led to long-term and permanent improvements in the ecological footprint indicator. Therefore, it is concluded that policy design should be more comprehensive, consistent, and structurally transformative to achieve environmental sustainability.