Decoupling the role of renewable energy, green finance and political stability in achieving the sustainable development goal 13: Empirical insight from emerging economies

Abstract

The quest for attaining ‘sustainable development goals (SDGs)’, especially ‘SDG‐13’, which addresses the policy towards lessening the risk of climate change, is impossible without abating CO ₂ emissions, which are a major contributor to climate change globally. Thus, this study inspects the decisive role played by renewable energy use, green finance, and political stability in achieving SDG‐13 by abating CO ₂ emissions for 14 emerging economies from 1990 to 2021. We have used the cross‐sectional autoregressive distributed lag and method of moments quantile regression estimators to analyse the impact of explanatory variables on the dependent variable, considering the probable endogeneity issue in the model. The outcome of the study signifies that renewable energy consumption and green finance substantially reduce CO ₂ emissions, whereas political stability is observed to have a positive impact on CO ₂ emissions. Moreover, the moderation effect of political stability and green finance is found to substantially reducing carbon emissions. This study thus suggests that emerging economies need a stronger political system to promote green financing and renewable energy consumption to attain SDGs by addressing climate change policy.