| Summary/Abstract |
According to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the principal threats to human well-being encompass both non-renewable and renewable energy sources, alongside a mounting environmental deficit, which aligns with the targets of SDG-7 and SDG-13. This study explores how environmental technologies, financial growth, and energy use influence the ecological footprint and green growth in the top-ten countries with the biggest ecological footprint from 1990 to 2019. Environmental innovations, green growth, and renewable energy improve the environment, while financial expansion and the use of non-renewable energy have been shown to be detrimental to the environment. Financial expansion, ecological impact, and non-renewable energy constrain green growth. However, environmental innovation and renewable energy deployment have a cumulative effect on green growth. Moreover, the results of the panel causality approach signpost a bidirectional causal association between environmental innovations, green growth, non-renewable and renewable energy, and ecological footprint. Nevertheless, it is observed that there exists a unidirectional causal relationship from financial development to ecological footprint and green growth. Moreover, this paper provides an in-depth evaluation and offers significant policy recommendations, both in a general sense and specifically targeted towards countries with the highest ecological footprints.
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