Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Environmental Science and Pollution Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-23453-3 RESEARCH ARTICLE The paradigms of transport energy consumption and technological innovation as a panacea for sustainable environment: is there any asymmetric association? Arsalan Tanveer 1  · Huaming Song 1  · Muhammad Faheem 1  · Abdul Daud 2 Received: 8 January 2022 / Accepted: 30 September 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022 Abstract Technological innovations have a great potential to develop the transportation system as more efcient, intelligent, connected, and sustainable. Therefore, transport energy consumption fundamentally transmutes how goods and people are moved with signifcant efects on transport demand with related energy consumption on a sustainable environment. To this end, our research aimed at investigating the environmental performance (carbon dioxide and ecological footprint) by stochastic impact by regression through a population, afuence, and technology (STIRPAT) model, and econometric approach for estimation of transport energy consumption from 1975 to 2018 for Pakistan. Moreover, our study supports the literature by exploring the association of technological innovations, fnancial development, carbon damage costs, and economic growth with the environment. The linear relationships of the variables are governed by the autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) model that interestingly explored that economic growth and energy consumption, and fnancial development degrade the environ- ment and resource depletion; however, technological innovations are inclined towards cleaner technologies. For asymmetric fndings, we employ the non-linear autoregressive distributive lag technique recently introduced by Shin et al. (2014). The fndings validate the existence of an asymmetric relationship between transport energy consumption and environmental indicators. The policymakers’ prerequisites the alternative energies apart from conventional energies in the transport sector with technological innovations in transport sector energy consumption like the electronic and hybrid vehicles for a cleaner environment. Keywords Ecological footprint · Technological innovation · CO 2 emissions · Transport energy consumption · STIRPAT · NARDL Introduction Today’s globalized world is highly aimed at competitive environmental sustainability with efcient and efective transport systems that are the backbone of economic growth. The efcient transport system works as a catalyst to enhance sustainable economic growth and employment opportunities by value addition for other industries (Mounce and Nelson 2019). The economic contribution from the transportation sector is between 6 and 12% for many world countries (IEA 2019). However, global petroleum consumption for the transport sector is 64.5%, and the total energy consump- tion is 39.9% (IEA 2019). Therefore, transport emissions play a key role in environmental pollution due to the heavy consumption of petroleum (Mohmand et al. 2020). Apart from other factors, fossil fuel energy consumption, climate changes, urbanization, international trade, and fnancial Responsible Editor: Roula Inglesi-Lotz * Huaming Song huaming@njust.edu.cn Arsalan Tanveer arsalantanveer1489@gmail.com Muhammad Faheem faheem@bzu.edu.pk Abdul Daud abduldaud302@gmail.com 1 School of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China 2 School of Economics, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, Pakistan