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Developing economies are an important engine of world economic growth. However, ensuring the quality of environmental assets is maintained amid rapid economic change remains a major challenge for most developing countries. Using the Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach and the heterogeneous causality test, this study analyzes the combined effects of energy usage, industrialization, gross domestic product (GDP) growth, and urbanization on CO 2 emissions for 23 developing countries across the 1995 to 2018 period. From our analysis, the long-run results reveal that a 1% increase in energy use, economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization increases CO 2 emissions by 0.23%, 0.17%, 0.54%, and 2.32%, respectively. Moreover, our model's short- to long-term equilibriums are adjusted at a yearly rate of 0.19%. Finally, to verify the panel ARDL long-run results, robustness tests were carried out using the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) and Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) approaches. Our results confirm that in the case of developing countries, CO 2 emissions are primarily influenced by GDP growth, energy use, industrialization, and urbanization. Furthermore, the panel causality analysis identified a bidirectional causal relationship between energy use, GDP growth, urbanization, industrialization, and CO 2 emissions. While these results can play an instrumental role in formulating CO 2 emission policies among our selected countries, our research can also assist policy makers and stakeholders in other developing economies implement important policy initiatives. These include, tax incentives and infrastructural developments that nurture environmentally friendly industrialization, deploy low-carbon technologies, promote sustainable forms of urbanization and urban planning, while also facilitating increases in both the investment in and adoption of renewable energy platforms. The establishment of such a comprehensive policy agenda can help emerging economies achieve strong and environmentally sustainable GDP growth over the long-term., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)