Unraveling the Nexus: An ARDL Analysis of Renewable Energy Consumption, Tourism, and FDI on Tunisia's Ecological Footprint

This study investigates the dynamic impacts of renewable energy consumption, tourism, and foreign direct investment (FDI) on Tunisia's ecological footprint from 1994 to 2022.We apply the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to examine these relationships.The results confirm cointegration among the variables and reveal distinct short-run and long-run dynamics.The long-run results indicate that tourism significantly increases ecological footprint, whereas FDI decreases it.Most notably, renewable energy consumption exhibits no statistically significant long-run impact.However, renewable energy significantly moderates environmental degradation in the short term.Additionally, FDI and tourism demonstrate complex, lagged short-run effects.The findings underscore the critical importance of distinguishing between short-run and long-run environmental impacts.The study concludes by offering specific policy recommendations to enable Tunisia to balance economic development with environmental sustainability.