Greening the path to carbon neutrality in the post-COP26 era: Embracing green energy, green innovation, and green human capital

Abstract

The COP26 Glasgow conference stressed the importance of all nations committing to more ambitious targets for reducing emissions to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 ​°C above pre-industrial levels. This is crucial since any temperature greater than that will have grave and irreversible climatic repercussions. This research, utilizing data from Ghana from 1980 to 2018, investigates the role of green innovation, green energy consumption, and green human capital in mitigating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to achieve carbon neutrality within the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework while using natural resources and industrialization as additional variables in the study model. Current econometric techniques are employed for accurate and reliable analyses, and the findings reveal the study variables as stationary and co-integrated in the long run. The novel quantile-on-quantile regression is adopted, and the empirical discoveries reveal that green energy consumption, green innovation, and green human capital mitigate CO2 emissions. However, the findings indicate that natural resources and industrialization escalate CO2 emissions in the country. The findings also validate the N-shape EKC hypothesis between economic growth and CO2 emissions in Ghana. Policy recommendations are offered based on these insights.