Environmental sustainability through renewable energy and banking sector development: policy implications for N-11...

Climate change has become an alarming condition for developed and developing countries. The main reason for this is the use of non-renewable energy (RE) in economic sectors. Therefore, the world economies are now replacing non-renewable with RE. The role of BANKs is fundamental for this transition because they can fund clean energy projects. Several studies probed the economic growth andCO2e association and ignored the role of BANK development. Therefore, this work investigates the influences of banking sector development on CO2 emissions (CO2e) in the next eleven countries. This work included other factors of GDP, clean energy, and non-RE in the model by taking annual data from 1990 to 2020. Robust econometric techniques are used to highlight the empirical outcomes. The cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag approach shows that BANK development is a coproduction factor toward CO2 production in the presence of economic development and renewable and nonrenewable energy. More credits from banks to the private sector are enhancing economic activity and increasing energy consumption. This means that a 1% increase in BANK development will increase CO2e by 0.01%. A 1% increase in RE is lowering CO2e by 0.31%. Therefore, this work highlights the importance of BANK development in creating sustainable development. The BANK can fund clean energy projects. Policymakers can utilize the BANK to encourage green investments in household and corporate sectors. The use of green technologies will ultimately bring a cleaner environment and sustainable development to N-11 countries. This work is helpful for policymakers in that they can utilize the banking sector to launch greener projects to attain sustainable development goals.