Environmental policy stringency and ecological footprint linkage: Mitigation measures of renewable energy and innovation

We scrutinize the environmental policies' efficacy in reducing ecological footprint by interweaving two other vibrant parameters of environmental degradation mitigation, i.e., renewable energy sources and innovation. To this end, we apply a Cross-Sectional Autoregressive Distributed Lags (CS-ARDL) approach to analyze panel time-series data (1990–2018) in the context of OECD countries. Our analysis shows that environmental policy significantly reduces ecological footprint through renewable energy and innovation channels. Our findings also support the idea that environmental policy's effectiveness is conditional on countries' bio-capacity surplus/deficit and the level of industrialization. The overall findings hold up well in the presence of cross-sectional dependence, short-run heterogeneity, and long-run homogeneity under the respective sample. Our findings underscore the need for more stringent environmental policies, supported by technological advancements and clean energy initiatives, to mitigate the impact of human economic activities on natural resources.