Abstract

Introduction

Literature review

Data

Method

Empirical results and discussions

Conclusions and policy implications

Data availability

Notes

References

Acknowledgements

Funding

Author information

Ethics declarations

Additional information

Rights and permissions

About this article

Abstract

This paper studies the effects of financial development, economic growth, and climate-related financial policies on carbon emissions for G20 countries. The focus is particularly on financial policies implemented to scale up green finance and address climate-related financial risks from 2000 to 2017 and represent this paper’s value added. The empirical results obtained by relying on the panel quantile regression approach indicate that the impacts of the different explanatory variables on carbon emission are heterogeneous. Specifically, the effect of the stock of short-term financial policies on carbon emissions is negative, and its effect becomes smaller at higher quantiles. The stock of long-term policies also shows significant negative coefficients, but its impact is stronger for higher quantiles. No significance is reported for the lowest quantile. Financial development contributes to improving environmental quality, and its impact is larger in higher emission countries. Energy consumption increases carbon emissions, with the strongest effects occurring at higher quantiles. Our results also support the validity of the EKC relationship and positive effects of GDP and population on high carbon emissions levels. Estimation results are robust to alternative model specifications and after controlling for the role played by adopting international climate change mitigation policies as proxied by the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol.

Introduction

Global warming has become one of the most severe and pressing issues because of the devastating consequences of environmental degradation on humanity and economic systems globally. The human effect on climate change is also widely reported, and carbon emissions are now considered the highest in history (Nagelkerken and Connell 2015). Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important greenhouse gas implicated in global warming (Scheffer et al. 2006; Solomon et al. 2009). Its accumulation in the atmosphere beyond certain limits can lead to irreversible impacts, which will be challenging to tackle at later stages (IPCC 2014, 2018).

At the international level, several efforts are put forward to mitigate climate change’s adverse effects by reducing carbon emissions. The UN Paris Agreement sets the goal of keeping global warming well below 2 °C and as close as possible to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. To comply with this objective, countries should reduce emissions to almost zero by 2050. Nevertheless, the special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2018) on the global temperature goals shows that the gap between current trends and emission reduction targets set by countries through their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) is widening and leading to somewhere between 3 and 4 °C of warming (den Elzen et al. 2019).