The aim of demand response concept is to mitigate the consumption of electric utility consumers to a reasonable consumption level so as to balance the demand-supply requirements. In this current research paper, demand response is considered as a multi-objective optimal economic emission dispatch issue to be addressed. The authors propose a novel nature-inspired optimization algorithm in the name of improved circle search algorithm (ICSA) to find the optimum combination between two generations, such as traditional generators, and demand response as a demand resource. The proposed ICSA was incorporated in MATLAB environment whereas the proposed optimization algorithm was evaluated using two standard test systems such as IEEE-30 bus system and 6-bus system. The optimization results substantiate that the proposed optimization algorithm is capable of mitigating both operation costs as well as test system emissions in a significant manner, while it was also achieving these results overcoming the specified constraints.