Ascertainment of Ecological Footprint and Environmental Kuznets in China

China’s ecological footprint is considered to be the highest globally. This couples with the rising concern of climate change, the present study seeks to investigate the China’s ecological impact with environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). China’s country specific data of 1979–2018 was employed for this study. Scientific approaches such as autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL)-bound testing, VECM granger causality and some diagnostic tests were all employed for effective justification of the findings of this study. Positive relationships at both 1 and 5% significant level were established between ecological footprint and the explanatory variables. Environmental Kuznets curve was confirmed for China. Findings from granger causality confirmed nexus among the selected variables through both unidirectional and bidirectional transmission. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.