Investigating the impact of environmental governance, green innovation, and renewable energy on trade-adjusted material footprint in G20 countries

Abstract

The primary objective of the recent “Conference of the Parties,” such as decarbonization, cannot be attained without considering sustainable resource management. The high consumption of natural resources in exportable goods amplifies natural resource conservation challenges and accelerates negative environmental externalities. The existing literature barely addressed the factors affecting natural resource management. This study has taken the initiative to evaluate the impact of environmental governance, green innovation, and renewable energy transition on the trade-adjusted resources management (through material footprint) in G-20 countries from 1990 to 2020. The study applied the method of the moments quantile regression to address non-linearity and heterogeneous parameters. The outcomes explored that environmental governance significantly reduces material footprint across all quantiles, while reduction effects are heterogeneous from lower to higher quantiles. Besides, green innovation and renewable energy transition profoundly mitigate the resource footprint at all innovative quantiles (0.1-0.9) with different magnitude and significance levels. The results also affirm the resource-based Environmental Kuznets Curve. Similar findings are also endorsed using alternative panel estimators. Overall the study offers valuable policy implications to improve resource management by enhancing ecological governance, green technologies, and energy transition in G-20 economies.