Does Faster Internet Clean the Air? Satellite Evidence on Digital Infrastructure and Nitrogen Dioxide in Uzbekistan and Central Asia

A large literature, mostly on Chinese provinces and cities, reports that digitalisation reduces carbon emissions. Most of this evidence relies on composite digital-economy indices and on emission figures that are estimated or spatially allocated rather than observed. This study tests the claim with directly measured quantities: tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) columns from the TROPOMI satellite instrument and crowdsourced Ookla measurements of network speed and latency, for 161 districts of Uzbekistan in 2019–2025 and 42 regions of Central Asia. District-level changes in gridded EDGAR CO₂ emissions for road transport and buildings closely reproduce national changes, which makes such inventories unsuitable as sub-national outcomes. Panel regressions with district and year fixed effects, a correction for the July 2021 change in the TROPOMI processor, and population controls give an elasticity of NO₂ with respect to mobile download speed of 0.001 (95% confidence interval −0.013 to 0.015). The average district's speed rose about 7.4-fold over the period, so the associated change in NO₂ is bounded between −2.6% and +3.0%. No alternative specification or regional estimate is statistically significant, and none of three pre-specified heterogeneity hypotheses survives a Holm correction. Within districts, faster mobile networks were not associated with a measurable change in NO₂.