Incidence of Air Pollution on Human Development in Emerging Countries: A Supervised Learning Approach

Climate change, driven by high concentrations of greenhouse gases, significantly impacts human development. This study examines the relationship between air pollution and the Human Development Index (HDI) and Legatum in 44 emerging countries. A supervised learning algorithm (linear regression) was employed after comparison with other algorithms (SVM, AdaBoost, SGD, Gradient Boosting, KNN, Tree, and Random Forest). From the predictions, it was identified that CO2 equivalent emissions have a directly proportional relationship with the Human Development Index (HDI). This is mainly due to the short-term increase in population well-being associated with activities that produce CO2, such as electricity and heat production, activities associated with the industrial sector, construction, transportation, residential, commercial, and public service activities.