From industrialization to dehumanization: understanding the deriving forces of environment and implications for...

Environment has detrimental effects on economic activity and human survival. Climate change is increasingly conducive to natural disasters, epidemics, social conflicts, food security, financial shocks, economic hardships, and life subsistence. In pursuit of this issue, this study empirically investigates the effects in outcome variable CO₂ provoked by independent variables governance, technological innovation, renewable energy, economic growth, and economic policy uncertainty in APEC economies. The APEC region accounts for 60% of global emissions, 62% of world GDP, 48% of global trade and contribute 8.7% renewable energy annually. A dynamic panel PMG-ARDL model is applied under the assumption of maximum likelihood estimation with DH causality and CS-ARDL for the period of 1996-2020. Our empirical results confirm that governance, technology innovation, and transitional energy have significant and positive effect to mitigate CO₂ emissions. The region needs to design policy mechanisms supportive to promote institutional quality, enhances transparency, ensure political stability and rule of law. It develops the infrastructure that ensures the adaptation of technology innovations, promotes green growth, improves energy efficiency, and implements carbon pricing mechanism. Economic policy uncertainty has insignificant and positive effects on environmental degradation. The findings show that governance, technological development, and transitional energy have an essential role to mitigate CO₂ emissions and achieve sustainable development. Moreover, this study will be helpful in understanding the implications of SDGs and achieving specific targets such as (SDG-7: Clean energy sources) and (SDG-8: Sustainable development goal) based on the largest set of emitters APEC.