Empowering sustainability practices through energy transition for sustainable development goal 7: The role of energy patents and natural resources among European Union economies through advanced panel

Abstract

Achieving sustainable development goals demands an unprecedented change in the global economic structure and a transformation of the traditional energy system. Based on the sustainability agenda, the current study's main aim is to investigate the trends in sustainability, measured through ecological footprints as determined by the energy transition, energy patents, natural resources, and non-renewable energy in the European Union members during 1998–2019. Cross-sectional-autoregressive-distributed lag approach has been applied to investigate both long-run and short-run relationships between the variables. The initial findings confirm the presence of cross-sectional dependence, heterogeneity in the slope coefficients, stationarity properties, and panel cointegration, respectively. The empirical results further ensure that energy transition and patents work for environmental sustainability in reducing ecological footprints in the long run. Contrarily, non-renewable energy and natural resources adversely impact the sustainability agenda while increasing the ecological footprints both in the long and short run. Moreover, the results are consistent with the robustness check through the Augmented Mean Group and Common Correlated Effects Mean Group estimators. The study suggests that the European Union members continue to promote the transition from non-renewable energy to clean energy sources to empower the sustainability plans determined by United Nations.