Renewable energy for sustainable development in Asia-Pacific region: Do foreign direct investment and regulatory quality matter?

Global climate change has already created noticeable ill-effects on the environmental system and attaining further economic growth without compromising environmental quality is a difficult challenge for every country on this planet. Inspired by United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) core agenda, we investigated the singular, combined, and coupling influence of income growth, foreign direct investment inflows, renewable energy, and regulatory quality (RQ) on climate change under the scale, technique, and composition effects hypothesis. This analysis enables the creation of appropriate policy interventions to mitigate the severity of climate change in the future for the diverse countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The study adopted the dynamic heterogenous estimation methodology responsible for accounting for the heterogeneity. We estimated 14 empirical models for the panel data from 1996 to 2015 of Asia-Pacific countries. Empirical results validated the scale, technique, and composition effects and include that the progress in the share of renewable energy consumption in emerging countries by 1% reduces the greenhouse gas emissions by 0.24% (99% Confidence interval [C.I]), whereas 1% increase in the interactive effect of renewable energy and RQ deepens the emissions by 0.35% (99% C.I). The income level and RQ aggravate greenhouse gas emissions; whereas renewable energy diminishes the overall emissions level in emerging and advanced economies. This article's empirical outcomes would facilitate climate change mitigation-related policy interventions of diverse economies in the Asia-Pacific region to attain Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs- 7 and 13).