Reducing Trade‐Offs of Net Zero Carbon Transitions Through Entrepreneurship and Coordinated Innovation: A Spatially Disaggregated Analysis Across Countries and World Regions

Transition processes towards a sustainable future benefit from historic perspectives, since feasible changes of socio‐technological conditions and processes depend on a holistic assessment of how actors are embedded in existing institutions, routines, and structures. Building on the Income–Population–Affluence–Technology equation and utilizing comprehensive panel data spanning 155 countries globally from 1996 to 2020, we provide a disaggregated assessment of rates of technological progress and innovation in support of climate neutrality and biodiversity conservation across countries and world regions and relate this to entrepreneurial activity and development of innovative technologies. Employing multinomial logit regression analysis, we analyze the possibility of negative or positive spillover effects from pursuing greenhouse gas emission reductions to other grand challenges, and how this potentially depends on entrepreneurship and innovation activities and leads to variation across countries and world regions. Our findings show that trade‐offs between climate change‐related CO2 emissions and indicators for biodiversity occur that can, however, be mitigated through entrepreneurial activities, technological innovation, and related policy choices.