Natural habitat vs human in competition for breathing space: Need for restructuring clean energy infrastructure

Abstract

Environmental quality is frequently explored as indicator of welfare and its linkage with cleaner energy use to fuel economic expansion, but the natural habitat capital and its diversity is often ignored as an important ingredient to sustaining a standard of living. International organizations point towards balancing renewable energy infrastructure development and conserving biodiversity, which calls for a non-linear effects analysis. This study explores the non-linear clean energy effects on biodiversity to find U or inverted-U shaped interaction, using the robust distribution Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag model for 66 countries. Furthermore, the Quantilewise estimates indicate that the short-run and long-run effects vary across different quantiles of biodiversity distribution. The long-run estimates infer that urbanization and globalization increase significantly enhances the environmental performance at 76 percentiles and all percentiles, respectively. While, output growth has a negative effect at 25 and 50 percentiles, and above the 50 percentiles, it positively affects environmental performance. The outcomes showed that clean energy has an inverted U-shaped effect on environmental performance. The research has found the best levels of green energy to match up with different levels of diversity in a country. Eventually, it guides further studies on why rapid renewable energies infrastructure development may harm biodiversity.