Probing environmental sustainability aspects of resource efficiency, renewable energy usage and globalization

Given the pace of economic expansion arising from energy usage among other social and economic factors, emerging economies such as Turkey are increasingly becoming the focus for a net zero future. Therefore, the current attempt considers the drivers of environmental sustainability via load capacity factor (LCF) in the context of resource efficiency, renewable energy utilization, and globalization for Turkey over the period 1982 to 2019. By employing series of empirical tools that include cross-quantilogram method, quantile-on-quantile regression, quantile regression approaches, and the nonparametric quantile Granger causality approach, the result shows there is statistically significant evidence of quantile-to-quantile dependence among the trio of (resource efficiency, renewable energy utilization, and globalization) and LCF such that the dependence it reflects some levels of positive directional predictability, thus showing that these indicators are important drivers of environmental sustainability in Turkey. Furthermore, for the quantile-on-quantile regression results, there are statistically significant and positive effects of (i) resource efficiency on LCF across its conditional quantiles of distribution, (ii) renewable energy utilization on LCF and is mostly visible at the lower quantile up to the upper middle quantiles of renewable energy utilization (0.05–0.65), and (iii) globalization on LCF across the lower to upper middle quantiles. With the other empirical approaches providing similar results, the outcome of this investigation offers specific policy insight into resource circularity and energy efficiency.