Industrialization Impact on Climate Change: An Examination of NICs

1. Introduction

Climate change is one of the main threats that concern all countries over the last few decades. When the trend of environmental degradation in the world is analyzed during the 1961 – 2018 period, it is clearly seen a dramatic increase in the number of countries that have an ecological deficit. Based on the GFN (2023) ecological footprint vs biocapacity dataset, it is calculated that 89 of 132 countries had a higher biocapacity than their ecological footprint, while 43 countries had a higher ecological footprint than their biocapacity in 1961. The year 1970 is a turning point in this comparison due to the World’s total ecological footprint exceeded its biocapacity. In this year, 79 of 141 countries had a higher biocapacity than their ecological footprint, and 62 had the opposite scenario. The gap between biocapacity and ecological footprint, with a few exceptions, continues to deepen every year. In 2018, only 50 of 182 countries had a higher biocapacity than their ecological footprint. In other words, nearly 73% of countries in the world are facing environmental degradation. Even these simple statistics reveal why the issue becomes a crucial topic and concerns the whole world.

According to IPCC (2014)“human activities are changing the climate”. Energy-related CO₂ emissions are the main reason for climate change. In the same report, it is stated that CO₂ emissions originated from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes are 78% of the total GHG emissions increase from 1970 to 2010 and a similar contribution is indicated for the 2000-2010 period. Thus, it is proof that the industrialization process causes climate change so countries have to make a choice between economic growth and combating climate change. So far, most high-income countries have begun their industrial process before climate change becomes a crucial concern and they have not taken into consideration the environmental degradation while aiming to achieve their economic growth targets. Moreover, it is observed that most of the newly industrialized countries follow the same path which makes industrialization a priority, and after the process has been completed the environment could become a topic (Okereke et al., 2019). So, it is expected that, after countries become developed they could have able to sustain their economic growth by enabling transmission to green economic activities (Rahman et al., 2021). This transmission requires decoupling industrialization from environmental impacts so the traditional type of manufacturing based on fossil fuels has to be changed. Not only this necessity but also the Paris Agreement limitation to CO₂ emissions, not to exceed 1.5⁰C above pre-industrial levels UNFCCC (2015) forces countries to change their industrial processes. While it is observed that positive developments have been occurring in developed countries in order to adopt this transmission, the newly industrialized countries have been behind to take the necessary steps.

Thus, this study aims to examine the industrialization impact on climate change for the newly industrialized countries (NICs) by using descriptive analysis as a methodology. The NICs are listed as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, and Turkey. The NICs have particular importance as they are the newly industrialized country group it consists of some of the world’s largest energy consumers so they cause a vast amount of CO₂ emissions (Rahman et al., 2021). Also, this country group has the 48.15% of the world’s population in 2021. The population density of the NICs is not a new matter, when the population data is analyzed, it is seen that the lowest share is 46.55% and the highest share is 50.22% between the years 1960 – 2021 (The World Bank, 2023a). Considering the population density of the countries, the energy consumption levels of these countries are also of vital importance in terms of energy transformation.