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This study searches the impact of tourism growth on emission pollutants in Cyprus (north), which is a small island in the Mediterranean and has shown significant development in hotel and casino sectors in the last two decades. Results from time-series analyses reveal that an inverted U-shaped EKC hypothesis is confirmed for Cyprus with and without tourism development. Tourism also exerts positively significant and long-term effects on the levels of carbon emissions, revealing that growth in the tourism sector causes degradation in the environment.

The correlation between technological innovation, economic growth, renewable energy, and ecological footprint carries significant policy implications for environmental sustainability. Furthermore, financial inclusion can drastically affect the technology-climate nexus across different countries and its moderating impacts have received sufficient attention. To do this, this study examined how technological innovation, financial inclusion, economic growth, and renewable energy affected emerging economies' ecological footprint from 1990 to 2019. Additionally, this study also scrutinizes the moderating role of financial inclusion with other regressors on ecological footprint. To account for structural shifts, disguised cointegration, and numerous breaks in panel regression, this study applies advanced panel estimation methods for empirical analysis. The estimated outcomes exhibit that the influence of technical innovation, climate technologies, and renewable energy significantly reduces the ecological footprint levels. Besides, economic growth and financial inclusion significantly increase the ecological footprint levels in the emerging economies. Furthermore, the integration of innovative technology and renewable energy in emerging countries mitigates the adverse effects of financial inclusion by making it easier for creative technologies and reducing ecological footprints. These results show that emerging countries' innovative technology and renewable energy sources should be integrated with financial inclusion to enable long-term mitigation of environmental damages and sustainable growth. Based on these estimated findings, the research recommends that emerging economies should hasten technological innovations along with stronger financial development to curtail ecological concerns without hindering the pace of sustainable economic growth.

The present study examines the potential of the traditional environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) with an extension for growing industrialized economies, including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, Mexico and Turkey (E-7 economies) spanning from 1995 to 2019. Since the E-7 economies are still in a growing phase, this study adds to the EKC phenomenon by taking into description human development, the use of renewable energy, and technological innovations for investigation. Second-generational panel econometrics techniques, such as cross-sectional augmented autoregressive distributive lag (CS-ARDL), Augmented Mean Group (AMG), and Dumitrescu-Hurlin causality tests, form the basis of the experimental framework’s design. The study confirms the existence of the EKC phenomena in E-7 economies, where income expansion is prioritized in relation to environmental sustainability. The study’s findings demonstrate that technological modernization helps to mitigate pollution level. Therefore, human development, technological innovation, and the use of renewable energy are held up as the panacea for reducing carbon emissions over the time period under study. Finally, some further policy suggestions are provided.

The study seeks to better comprehend the ecological footprint of the United States by analyzing the effects of digital financial inclusion (FinTech) as well as renewable and non-renewable energy usage. Data from 2005 Q1 to 2020 Q4 were analyzed using the quantile autoregressive lag (QARDL) method. It also used Granger causality in quantiles to analyze the correlation between variables and draw conclusions about their relative importance. Quantile-wise, the error correction parameter is statistically significant with the predicted negative sign, as shown by the results obtained using the QARDL method. Indications are mounting that the relationship between these variables and the United States’ ecological footprint is returning to its long-term equilibrium. However, in the long/short-run period, across all quantiles, economic growth and consumption of non-renewable energy have a positive impact on the ecological footprint. The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) theory was also examined, which holds that an inverted U-shaped link exists between economic growth and environmental degradation. The QARDL study’s findings corroborated the presence of an EKC in the US, lending credence to the theory that while economic growth at first promotes environmental deterioration, further progress ultimately promotes environmental improvement. The study additionally checked the results of the QARDL test for robustness using the ARDL approach. Recommendations for public policy are included in the paper for consideration by legislators and policymakers.