Environmental cost of non-renewable energy and economic progress: Do ICT and financial development mitigate some burden?

Environmental sustainability is jeopardized if global greenhouse gas pollution and biodiversity depletion increase. Achieving sustainable production and greener growth has been a core challenge for developing economies. Since both financial development and energy consumption contribute to environmental externalities, economic growth would remain uneven and insufficient. Therefore, the current study examines the role of information and communication technologies (ICT), financial development, trade openness, and fossil fuel energy for the rising level of ecological footprints in Pakistan. Moreover, this study unveils the moderating role of ICT and financial development for ecological footprint. This novel research is based on the quarterly data from 1960Q1 to 2019Q4 using non-parametric causality-in-quantiles techniques to test for causality-in-mean and causality-in-variance since there might be no causality in the first moment, but higher-order interdependencies occur. The study findings exposed that financial development, ICT, and fossil fuels have significant predictive power for ecological footprint, demonstrating asymmetric predictability over ecological distribution. Furthermore, ICT and financial development found a significant interaction when it pertains to predicting country pollution levels. Overall, the study contents that the country's emergence needs to enhance the investment volume in cleaner and renewable energy sources (SDG-7: cleaner and affordable energy) and innovative environmental reforms for the industrial sector. The evidence supports the notion that the government should establish strict regulations on industrial smoke, waste, pollution emanations, scrape, transportation, and the burning of plastics and chemicals in the industry.