Badri G Narayanan, Dwijendra Dwivedi, Adhithya Balasubramanian
The United Nations remark that climate change is the defining issue in today’s world. Several calls have been made for immediate and drastic action to save the future. While several factors like changing weather patterns and rising sea levels have been focal points, economics and environmental policy lie at the core of addressing solutions towards climate change. With increasing population and industrialization, there has been a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions, causing severe damage to the environment and livelihoods.
Hence this Paper looks at the economic and ecological behavior behind the release of greenhouse gas emissions by thirty-three countries in Europe over a time interval from 1990-2016. It uses a time-series clustering analysis on the data to find significant results between average temperature, the average change in temperature over the years, and the level of economic growth as against greenhouse gas emissions between clusters. The above exercise further helps to analyze the policy implications of different countries and the economic development in the region by proving the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis using clustering results.