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Digital inclusion to enhance energy sustainability: public participation and environmental governance in the new media era to achieve energy sustainable goals

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Abstract

Renewable energy not only helps to safeguard the environment and slow down climate change but also supports economic growth and energy security. The significance of renewable energy sources is expanding as more people throughout the globe understand how important it is to switch to clean energy sources. Therefore, empirics are in search of the factors that can promote renewable energy production. This analysis investigates some of the novel determinants of renewable energy production, such as digital inclusion, public participation, and environmental governance, which have not been examined previously in any study. For empirical analysis, the study employs the ARDL and QARDL estimation techniques using Chinese data from 1998Q1 to 2021Q4. The analysis findings confirm that digital financial inclusion, ICT, and GDP are vital in boosting both short and long-run renewable production. Green investment, environmental governance, and carbon emissions also significantly and favourably impact long-run renewable energy production. In the Quantile ARDL model, digital financial inclusion is positively linked to renewable energy production at most of its quantiles in the short and long run, while the ICT, GDP, environmental governance, and carbon emissions are positively linked to renewable energy in most quantiles in the long-run only. The Wald test confirms the asymmetric impact for all variables in the long run, which implies that policymakers should consider the positive and negative changes in these factors while devising policies for enhancing renewable energy production.

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Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. The annual data series were transformed into quarterly data series using the quadratic match sum technique as described by Cho et al. (2015)

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Funding

 This project is supported by Scientific Research Fund of Zhejiang Provincial Education Department (Grant No.Y201941810), Foundation of Zhejiang Open University for Youths (Grant NO. XKT-QN017), and the third batch of 312 Talents Training Project of Zhejiang Open University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Teaching Center Department, Zhejiang Open University, Hangzhou, 310012, China

    Chenfeng Song

  2. School of Economics, Quaid-I-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Muhammad Tariq Majeed

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  1. Chenfeng Song
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  2. Muhammad Tariq Majeed
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Contributions

This idea was given by C. S. C. S. and M. T. M. analyzed the data and wrote the complete paper, while C. S. read and approved the final version.

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Correspondence to Chenfeng Song.

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Song, C., Majeed, M.T. Digital inclusion to enhance energy sustainability: public participation and environmental governance in the new media era to achieve energy sustainable goals. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 123633–123642 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-30837-6

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