Impact of renewable and non-renewable energy, trade openness, GDP, and urbanization on C0₂ emissions: a panel study of CEE countries

The growing concern over climate change mitigation has caught the interest of researchers to explore the impact of energy consumption and growth in income on CO₂ emissions. This study aims to examine the effect of renewable and nonrenewable energy, trade openness, gross domestic product (GDP) and urbanization on CO₂ emissions in Central and Eastern Europe.

This research uses panel data for 12 countries of Central and Eastern Europe from 1990 to 2020 and analyses how renewable and nonrenewable energy consumption, per capita GDP, trade openness and urbanization affect CO₂ emissions using DF–generalized method of moments (GMM) and one-step system GMM methods.

The findings highlight that renewable energy consumption, per capita GDP and rapid urbanization have significant effects on CO₂ emissions growth across the countries studied. Notably, the rise in renewable energy consumption has a more substantial impact on CO₂ emissions growth compared to nonrenewable energy consumption. However, the study finds no significant evidence that nonrenewable energy is associated with reduced CO₂ emissions growth. Thus, promoting renewable energy consumption could lead to a substantial reduction in CO₂ emissions growth in these countries.

This study is the first attempt to evaluate the combined impact of renewable and nonrenewable energy, trade openness, GDP and urbanization on CO₂ emissions in the context of Central and Eastern Europe.