Empowering sustainable development through finance, economic factors, technology-innovation, and Governance Index for a flourishing future

Climate change and its global effects are the most dangerous threat to human existence in recent years. Global warming, rising sea levels, hurricanes, and forest fires are just a few examples of severe weather changes and aberrant climatic occurrences that threaten the stability of our energy infrastructure and the smooth functioning of our societies-identified in previous studies that a critical challenge in the fight against environmental degradation is green projects. The quantitative method is applied to secondary data to achieve the desired results. The study data range is from 2003 to 2019, relying upon the availability of the data of primary variables, covering 111 countries across the globe for policy recommendations. The data for analysis is taken from WDI, OECD.stat, and world governance indicators. The data has been organized in Excel and then imported to the STATA-17 for further analysis. This research considers the major role of Governance as a mediator for the first of its kind study, which introduced the entropy-weighted method for calculating the governance index in sustainable environmental research. The study includes dependent variables, such as greenhouse gas emission (sustainable development), with Governance as a mediator. FMOLS is applied for estimation as the data diagnostics tests suggest checking the long and short-term relationship among variables based on the cointegration and stationarity. The study findings show that sustainable finance and technology innovations negatively affect GHGs. However, trade openness, infrastructure, economic growth, and FDI significantly positively affect GHGs. Including a mediator makes the results more significant, suggesting that governance plays an essential role in enhancing these factors.