Drivers and Barriers to the adoption of Renewable Energy: Investigating with the Ecological Lens

The growing energy demand amidst unprecedented climatic patterns pose a significant challenge of the century. Given this backdrop, the exploration of renewable energy as a viable solution for ensuring energy security becomes imperative. Considering Asia's significant contribution to global energy consumption and emissions, this study examines the impact of renewable and non-renewable energy consumption on environment across 24 developing countries in Asia. Employing the Pooled Mean Group model within Panel Auto Regressive Distributed Lag framework facilitates the examination of panel-specific heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependencies. This research differs from much of the existing literature by incorporating ecological footprint as an additional measure of environmental degradation, alongside CO2 emissions. The findings suggest that increased consumption of renewable energy is associated with a reduction in emissions and ecological footprint, underscoring the potential of renewable energy to achieve energy security in Asian countries without exacerbating climate and environmental degradation.