Impact of Population Ageing on Environmental Pollution in Iran

The world’s population is ageing and virtually every country in the world is experiencing growth in the number and proportion of older persons in its population. It is predicted that old population will double from 2015 to 2030 in Iran. Actually, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and urbanization rate is over 70% in Iran. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of population ageing and urbanization on air pollution over the period of 1971 to 2013 in Iran.

In this study, based on the results of variables stationary, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach was applied.

The results revealed that the relationship between old population and CO2 emission per capita is inverted U-shaped and statistically significant, and CO2 emission initially increases with the increase of old population and then drops with the increase of old population. Moreover, the results imply that a relative increase in urbanization in the short and long terms is associated with the increase of CO2 emissions per capita. It was also found that gross domestic production and energy consumption per capita positively affect CO2 emissions per capita in the short and long terms. Technological advances have a significant positive effect on per capita CO2 emissions in the long term.
Discussion and

In this study, according to the urbanization coefficient which has the greatest influence on pollution emissions (3.63 in the long term), the measures should be taken by policymakers to minimize the damage of urbanization growth to the environment. In other words, urban development plans should be designed in harmony with the environmental issues.