Mahmood Ahmad

Climate change and environmental degradation pose significant challenges to global sustainability, necessitating innovative approaches to economic and financial practices. While green finance and eco-innovation have emerged as potential solutions to mitigate ecological degradation, there is a notable gap in the literature regarding their efficacy in addressing the “resource curse” phenomenon. This study aims to bridge this gap by exploring the impacts of green finance, eco-innovation, and natural resources on the ecological footprint of 20 OECD countries from 1990 to 2020. Additionally, this study examines the moderating role of green finance and eco-innovation in the relationship between natural resources and the ecological footprint. To achieve this objective, the study employed a comprehensive methodological framework, including the method of moments quantile regression and machine learning techniques. The results revealed that natural resources exacerbate environmental degradation, which validates the “resource curse” hypothesis. Green finance is negatively and significantly related to the ecological footprint across all quantiles. The interaction term of green finance and natural resources shows a significant and positive association with the ecological footprint at the lower quantiles, whereas at the upper quantile, the coefficient value becomes negative but statistically insignificant. Eco-innovation fosters environmental sustainability across all quantiles, with a more pronounced effect observed in the upper quantiles. Eco-innovation significantly moderates the association between natural resources and the ecological footprint, indicating that eco-innovation can be a viable tool for curing the resource curse. The robustness test further validates these results. The study recommends that governments prioritize the development and implementation of comprehensive green finance frameworks to direct investments in environmentally sustainable projects, promote eco-innovation, and ensure the sustainable use of natural resources.

Achieving sustainable development while mitigating environmental degradation is a pressing global challenge. Economic development, accompanied by industrialization, fossil fuel consumption, and unsustainable use of natural resources, is widely identified in the literature as a leading cause of environmental degradation. Green energy transition (GET) and economic complexity—the shift towards more advanced and knowledge‐driven manufacturing, can be crucial strategies in reducing ecological degradation and helping countries achieve climate change mitigation targets. Green finance can play an important role in environmental sustainability, while geopolitical risk can impede countries' climate mitigation efforts. In this context, this study investigates the impact of GET, economic complexity, green finance, and geopolitical risk on the ecological footprint in OECD countries from 1995 to 2021. These four critical factors are integrated into the same environmental policy framework due to their potential to influence environmental sustainability in OECD economies. The study employed the Method of Moments Quantile Regression to provide robust estimates across different quantiles. The empirical outcomes unveiled that GET significantly reduces the ecological footprint across all quantiles. The economic complexity posed a significant and negative impact across all quantiles except at the lower quantile ( τ = 0.10). Green finance also poses a negative impact, indicating its effectiveness in promoting environmental sustainability. However, geopolitical risk exacerbates the ecological footprint. The control variables, GDP and urbanization, are found to increase the ecological footprint. In terms of policy implications, this study suggests that policymakers should focus on increasing the share of green energy, fostering economic complexity and green finance, and mitigating geopolitical tensions to reduce the ecological footprint and achieve environmental sustainability in OECD nations.

Amidst the ongoing low‐carbon transition, the phenomenon of population aging is receiving increasing attention. Nevertheless, the relationship between population aging and environmental quality has not been conclusively established, and existing studies have yet to delve into the mechanism of the effect of population aging on energy and environmental quality. This paper utilizes the panel data of 30 Chinese provinces and regions from 2000 to 2019 and constructs the benchmark model, the nonlinear mediating effect, and the nonlinear moderating effect models to explore the nonlinear association between population aging and energy footprint, respectively. Additionally, we develop a comprehensive aging index employing principal component analysis (PCA) and measure the energy footprint by carbon sink approach. The results show that population aging has a nonlinear effect on the energy footprint with an inverted “U” shape and there is an inflection point on the curve of value 0.453. We also verify that population aging indirectly affects the energy footprint through its nonlinear impact on labor productivity, with an instantaneous mediating effect of 3.0902. Furthermore, the high‐quality economic development has a nonlinear moderating impact on the inverted “U”‐shape between population aging and energy footprint. As the level of high‐quality economic development increases, the shape of the inverted “U” curve flattens out, and the inflection point shifts to the left. Among the five sub‐indicators of high‐quality economic development, green development has the most significant effect on the inverted “U” curve of population aging and energy footprint. These noteworthy findings offer valuable insights for formulating effective strategies to enhance the favorable effects of aging on environmental quality from multifaceted perspectives.