Carbon emissions are primarily the result of human activity in urban areas. Inadequate sanitary facilities, contaminated drinking water, nonrenewable energy, and high traffic congestion have all impacted the natural ecosystem. Using data from 1975 to 2019, the study assessed the impact of the aforementioned variables on Pakistan's carbon emissions in light of this crucial fact. The ARDL cointegration method was used to estimate the short- and long-run parameter estimates. Urban sanitation challenges and energy consumption increase carbon emissions, which affects the natural environment by raising a country's carbon intensity. Economic expansion confirmed the inverted U-shaped relationship between carbon emissions and economic growth to verify the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis in the long run. In contrast, the monotonically rising function of carbon emissions provides evidence of the nation's economic development in the short run. Access to clean drinking water improves population health and encourages the purchase of eco-friendly products. The government must improve sanitation services and use renewable energy sources to enhance air quality.
The world faces a high alert of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), leading to a million deaths and could become infected to reach a billion numbers. A sizeable amount of scholarly work has been available on different aspects of social-economic and environmental factors. At the same time, many of these studies found the linear (direct) causation between the stated factors. In many cases, the direct relationship is not apparent. The world is unsure about the possible determining factors of the COVID-19 pandemic, which need to be known through conducting nonlinearity (indirect) relationships, which caused the pandemic crisis. The study examined the nonlinear relationship between COVID-19 cases and carbon damages, managing financial development, renewable energy consumption, and innovative capability in a cross section of 65 countries. The results show that inbound foreign direct investment first increases and later decreases because of the increasing coronavirus cases. Further, the rise and fall in the research and development expenditures and population density exhibits increasing coronavirus cases across countries. The continued economic growth initial decreases later increase by adopting standardized operating procedures to contain coronavirus disease. The inter-temporal relationship shows that green energy source and carbon damages would likely influence the coronavirus cases with a variance of 17.127% and 5.440%, respectively, over a time horizon. The policymakers should be carefully designing sustainable healthcare policies, as the cost of carbon emissions leads to severe healthcare issues, which are likely to get exposed to contagious diseases, including COVID-19. The sustainable policy instruments, including renewable fuels in industrial production, advancement in cleaner production technologies, the imposition of carbon taxes on dirty production, and environmental certifications, are a few possible remedies that achieve healthcare sustainability agenda globally.