Moving toward sustainable agriculture: The nexus between clean energy, ICT, human capital and environmental degradation under SDG policies in European countries

Abstract

The United Nation's adaptation of the 2030 sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda has swung the attention toward sustainability. However, in achieving SDGs, this study investigates the nexus between agricultural productivity, renewable energy, ICT, human capital, CO2 emissions, and natural resources in a panel of ten European Union (EU) countries from 1996 to 2019. Our study uses the panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model of the Pool Mean Group (PMG) to estimate the long-run and short-run effects and heterogeneous causality approach. The empirical results ratify that a 1 % upsurge in the coefficient of renewable energy, ICT, and human capital increases agricultural productivity by 0.174 %, 0.030 %, and 2.158 % in the long run. Whereas, CO2 emission and natural resources decrease agricultural productivity. Finally, various causality exists among variables for EU countries. Our empirical results for the EU countries are notionally reliable and offer important policy implications accordingly.