Resource efficiency, energy productivity, and environmental sustainability in Germany

Industrialized nations must significantly reduce their emissions, necessitating the use of linkages with other environmental initiatives, in order to keep global warming and other adverse socioeconomic effects within reasonable bounds. Increasing resource efficiency, or lowering the amount of resources needed to produce one unit of economic output, is a common objective sought at all scale levels. How does decarbonization link to resource efficiency? Does increasing energy efficiency lead to a drop in emissions for economies? Considering these important issues, the present study aims to capture the effect of resource efficiency and energy productivity on environmental sustainability while controlling globalization and economic growth between 1995 and 2020 in Germany. To the best of our understanding, this is the first research to seek to undertake this connection for Germany. Therefore, the empirical results are expected to bring insights into and start a fresh discussion on environmental sustainability. The present study used both asymmetric and symmetric autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approaches. The empirical outcomes of the nonlinear ARDL method showed that economic progress instigated a negative impact on environmental sustainability. Moreover, a positive shock in resource efficiency drops the pollution level while any negative shock in resource efficiency increases the environmental pollution in Germany. The impact of energy productivity is negative on environmental pollution. Lastly, globalization increases the consumption-based CO2 emissions. Moreover, the outcomes of ARDL estimation also validated the outcomes of nonlinear ARDL.