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Transitions to renewable energy sources have begun in several countries in an effort to decrease the impact of solid fossil waste. The paper examines the connection between renewable energy consumption, FDI, and CO2 emissions using econometric analysis of data from France, Germany, and Italy. The purpose of this research is to examine the correlation between the use of renewable energy sources, FDI, CO2 emissions from energy sources, and GDP growth in France, Germany, and Italy from 1971 to 2021. The data is analysed using many different tests, including those for stationarity, Granger causality, and the Toda-Yamamoto method. According to the findings, the utilisation of renewable energy sources is a driving factor in cutting CO2 emissions in France, whereas in Italy, emissions are the result of foreign direct investment. In Germany and Italy, the lack of a correlation between consumption of renewable energy, FDI, and CO2 emissions over the long term suggests that renewable energy does not play a significant role in driving economic development in those countries. Our results add to the existing body of knowledge and imply that investments in renewable energy are crucial to achieving sustainable development. Governments should take action to mitigate the negative effects of FDI on the environment and promote investments in renewable energy.

Energy is among the key drivers of economic growth. As the attainment of sustainable development becomes the major goal of modern economies, energy resources must, however, be appraised not only based on their capacity to fuel growth but also on their ability to sustain the same. This paper adds to the growing research on the growth-energy nexus by incorporating the dynamics of sustainability alongside the traditional growth factors of capital and labor using France’s yearly series from 1980 to 2019. The newly developed dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) simulation was adopted to explore the nature of the long-run dynamics among the variables. The empirical findings support the notion that energy consumption significantly impacts gross domestic product (GDP) positively whereas, in the case of the adjusted net savings (ANS) which is an index of sustainable development, its long-run impact is positive but insignificant. The results also show that the counterfactual effects of shocks to energy usage are smaller on economic growth than sustainable development. France is recommended to promote green growth by boosting the contribution of renewables in the energy mix to fully optimize and sustain growth from energy resources.

Improving agricultural energy efficiency is essential in reducing energy consumption and achieving agricultural sustainable development. This paper aims to measure the agricultural total-factor energy efficiency in China rather than the partial-factor energy efficiency while taking full account of regional heterogeneity and to investigate the driving factors of agricultural total-factor energy efficiency. The empirical results showed that the average value of agricultural total-factor energy efficiency is 0.814 in China, and the technological gap ratio is 0.853. The regional difference in agricultural total-factor energy efficiency was quite obvious. Higher agricultural energy inputs are associated with higher agricultural total-factor productivity. The total value of potential agricultural energy savings in 30 provinces of China reached 1704.41 billion tons of standard coal. In terms of the absolute amount of agricultural energy saving, the amount was largest in the low-energy-input area, which was 113.87 million tons of standard coal, accounting for 66.81% of the total potential saving amount. Furthermore, we used the Tobit model to analyze the influencing factors of agricultural total-factor energy efficiency. We found that the proportion of agriculture to GDP has a positive impact on agricultural total-factor energy efficiency, while the per capita income of farmers, fiscal support for agriculture, the illiteracy rate of farmers, agricultural labor input, and agricultural capital stock have a negative impact on agricultural total-factor energy efficiency. Finally, we proposed policy implications in terms of agricultural technological progress, agricultural infrastructure, technical training, etc.

The objective of this paper is to illustrate the main results of a German case study on citizen awareness and habits regarding sustainability, energy consumption and related public policies. A specific methodological tool, called STAVE, has been developed in order to create evidence about citizens’ daily energy-related behaviour at home and to investigate their motives, activities and obstacles as to saving energy. The results show how participants are aware that energy use is strongly linked to environmental issues and climate change. Moreover, they are able to deliver a rich picture of their everyday energy use at home including motives and barriers to save energy. Another major topic that goes beyond reasoning about energy use at home is the question of the social aspects of sustainability. Thus, there were interactions about the connections between social status and the opportunity to engage in a sustainable lifestyle. In this sense, the methodology used allows raising some contradictions and paradoxes among participant discourses, and it seems clear that to live in a sustainable way is a major challenge for participants. According to the recent literature, the need for a means to support policy making for sustainability by exploring the complexities of environment-related citizen behaviours is evident. In this sense, the STAVE method provides a procedure and a set of techniques that can be used in different ways to investigate and explore the patterns of sustainability-related practical reasoning and practical action deployed by citizens across a broad range of real-world settings.

Our paper focuses on the renewable energy and EU 2020 target for energy efficiency in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We study the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in these two EU Member States through the prism of the Europe 2020 strategy and the 3 × 20 climate and energy package and economic growth (represented by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that allows to measure the national dynamics and provide cross-country comparisons) without attributing specific attention to issues such as the electrification of transport or heating, and thence leaving them outside the scope of this paper. Both Czech Republic and Slovakia are two post-Communist countries that still face the consequences of economic transformation and struggle with the optimal management of natural resources. Both countries encountered profound system transformation after 1989 that are apparent in all three measures of sustainable development used in our study. We show that it is unlikely that the planned increase in renewable energy in the Czech Republic and Slovakia will reach its targets, but they might succeed in reducing their energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Our findings show that the energy intensity of Czech and Slovak economies increased in the early 2000s and then stabilized at a level about twice of the EU average. It appears that this value is likely to remain the same in the forthcoming years. However, implementation of GHG emissions in the Czech Republic and Slovakia may be at risk in case the proper energy policy is not maintained. Moreover, our results show how the increase in the share of renewable energy and improvement in energy efficiency go hand-in-hand with mining and exploiting the energy sources that is notorious for the transition economies. We also demonstrate that a proper energy policy is required for effectively reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. There is a need for commitments made by relevant stakeholders and policymakers targeted at achieving sustainable economic growth and energy efficiency. In addition, we demonstrate that there is a need for maintaining a proper balance between economic development and environmental protection, which is a must for the EU sustainable energy development agenda and all its accompanying targets for all its Member States.

The paper is concerned with predicting energy consumption in the production and product usage stages and searching for possible changes in product design to reduce energy consumption. The prediction of energy consumption uses parametric models based on regression analysis and artificial neural networks. In turn, simulations related to the identification of improvement opportunities for reducing energy consumption are performed using a constraint programming technique. The results indicate that the use of artificial neural networks improves the quality of an estimation model. Moreover, constraint programming enables the identification of all possible solutions to a constraint satisfaction problem, if there are any. These solutions support R&D specialists in identifying possibilities for reducing energy consumption through changes in product specifications. The proposed approach is dedicated to products related to high-cost energy use, which can be manufactured, for example, by companies belonging to the household appliance industry.

Russia's competitiveness and productivity encounter the intense environmental challenges due to the reckless fossil fuel consumption, putting this country's long-run sustainability at risk. Despite this, this country intends to achieve the sustainable development goal by cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 70% of its 1990 level as pledged in the Paris Agreement in 2016. This research assesses the relationship between disaggregate (renewable and non-renewable) energy consumption and sustainable development within the purview of financial, demographic and country risk indicators using annual time-series data from 1990 to 2020. This paper utilizes an augmented ARDL approach to co-integration and a dynamic ARDL simulation model to detect counterfactual forecasting shocks to the predictor variables and their effects on the predicted indicator. The study's findings divulge that renewable energy consumption escalates the sustainable development in the long run, whereas non-renewable energy consumption declines. Then again, urbanization and political terror scale (PTS) have a long-term adverse effect on sustainable development. On the other hand, financial openness substantially exerts a favorable long-term influence on sustainable development. Therefore, this study suggests shifting to generous renewable energy usage to ease the adverse effect of non-renewable energy consumption on the sustainable development in Russia.

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of studies on sustainable development. The majority of research focuses on developed countries and issues that are incompatible with developing nations. This study addresses a gap in the literature by reviewing the research on developed and developing economies, as well as their social and environmental boundaries, under the renewable energy and sustainable development (RESD) nexus. It also explores how RESD may be applied in extreme situations such as population increase, energy supply disruptions, and transportation shortfalls. The fundamental contribution of this paper is to provide detailed debate from the perspective of economic growth hypotheses and their relationship with energy usage and renewable energy solutions for sustainable growth and development.

Energy consumption is of great significance to the sustainable development of the economy. Due to the spatial heterogeneity of low-carbon growth in regional economies, the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth is complicated. However, a few researches have been published about spatial spillover effects and non-linearity of energy consumption and financial development on regional economic growth in China. Based on the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2007 to 2017, this paper analyzes the spatial spillover effects and threshold effects of energy consumption and financial development on regional economic growth by using spatial and nonlinear econometric methods. The main conclusions are as follows. Spatial econometric methods show that financial development and energy consumption are two factors of production input to promote China’s economic growth. Meanwhile, energy consumption and financial development have spillover effects on regional economic growth. Additionally, the nonlinear econometric method finds that with increasing financial development, the impact of energy consumption on economic growth is segmented. Therefore, relevant policies should be implemented to enhance the role of finance in energy consumption to promote low-carbon growth of China’s economy.

In recent decades, residential energy consumption has grown in Mexico despite high poverty levels. While inequalities in energy have been documented, less attention has been paid to practices of consumption. Particularly, we sustain that it is necessary to account for changes in associated behaviors, which shape energy use, such as the acquisition of electrical appliances. This paper analyzes if there is evidence of diffusion of energy practices from higher to lower-income households. We hypothesize that more intensive energy practices expand across groups beyond their demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Employing a harmonized dataset of thirteen Income and Expenditure Household Surveys, we assess changes in electrical appliances and electricity consumption. Using latent class analysis, we construct energy profiles that identify underlying consumption behaviors from sociodemographic and residential characteristics. We find support for the argument that intensive energy practices expanded from high to lower socioeconomic groups. While this trend reflects improvements in living conditions in Mexico, it also highlights the environmental challenges that increasing consumption poses for sustainable development goals.

This paper analyzes structural indicators of economic efficiency and energy intensity consumption as determinants of sustainable economic development for the selected 33 European countries. The correlation, regression and multivariate factor analyses are applied to test the associations between the selected structural variables of energy intensity consumption, economic efficiency, and the main driving forces behind these developments. Economic efficiency is positively associated with expenditures on research and development (R&D) and a greater technological intensity of exports, while at the same time the economic efficiency of R&D expenditures and technological intensity of exports reduce the energy intensity consumption of the economy. The results suggest that management strategies and policies directed towards R&D expenditures, human capital investments, and technologically intensive export oriented products are improving economic efficiency performance and contributing to energy saving sustainable economic development. The technological intensity of products reduces energy consumption, which is related to restructuring of energy intensive industries into more advanced and energy saving ones with higher value added per unit of product, but with lower energy consumption per unit of product. Santrauka Autoriai analizuoja struktūrinius ekonominio efektyvumo ir energijos vartojimo intensyvumo, kaip vienų iš pagrindinių subalansuotos plėtros kintamųjų, rodiklius. Tirti buvo pasirinktos 33 Europos valstybės. Autoriai, siekdami pagrįsti iškeltus teiginius, naudojo koreliacinę, regresinę analizę bei daugiakriterinius metodus galimoms ekonominio efektyvumo bei energijos vartojimo laipsnio (ir kitų, ne mažiau svarbių elementų) variacijoms nustatyti. Ekonominis efektyvumas labai dažnai asocijuojasi su tyrimais ir plėtra (R&D), eksportuojamomis aukštosiomis technologijomis. Remdamiesi atliktų tyrimų rezultatais autoriai siūlo nukreipti tiek politinius sprendimus, tiek valdymo strategijas į tyrimų ir plėtros (R&D) veiklas, investicijas į žmogiškuosius išteklius, technologinius sprendimus, nes visa tai galima susieti su subalansuotos plėtros koncepcija. Reikšminiai žodžiai: ekonominis efektyvumas, energijos vartojimas, tyrimai ir plėtra, technologinis intensyvumas, subalansuota plėtra, Europa