Investigating the Routes toward Environmental Sustainability: Fresh Insights from Korea

The environmental issues that have arisen as a result of brisk economic expansion have evolved into a barrier to the process of social development. Based on this background, this article investigates the consequences of economic development, energy consumption, and urbanization on greenhouse gas emissions (a proxy for environmental sustainability) in Korea. Using the data from 1990 to 2019 and employing the autoregressive distributed lag method for empirical investigations, the results demonstrate that economic expansion, urbanization, and non-renewable energy consumption all constitute a danger to environmental sustainability because they positively influence greenhouse gas emissions. Oppositely, the results demonstrate that renewable energy consumption enhances environmental sustainability because it negatively impacts greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, a fresh discovery is that these results are consistent over time. In addition, the results of the causality test show that two-way causal links between economic growth, non-renewable energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions have been found in both the short and long runs, whereas unidirectional causal links between urbanization, renewable energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions have also been discovered. The most significant contribution that the results of this study may make is that they can provide several policy proposals for environmental sustainability in Korea and expand the literature that already exists on this issue in Korea.