Abstract
The Paris Accord has brought the world's governments together to begin implementing plans for their individual economies to become carbon-free. The goal of attaining low-carbon growth is not, however, as simple as it would appear since the world economies, which are dependent on fossil fuels and are fast expanding, are concentrated on accelerating economic expansion at the price of worse environmental effects. In light of this, the study aims to investigate the combined effects of the composite risk index (CRI), green innovation (GINOV), and environmental policy stringency (EPS) on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the context of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) countries while controlling for gross domestic product (GDP) and renewable energy research and development (RERD) over the period from 1960 to 2020. The research addresses the problems of cross-sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity in the data set used for analysis by using the second-generation cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lags framework to evaluate long- and short-run models. The corresponding findings show cointegrating relationships between the research variables. Additionally, the results of the regression demonstrate that EPS, GINOV, and RERD contribute to a long-term decrease in CO2 emissions. CRI and GDP, however, increase CO2 emissions. It is suggested that environmental policies be tightened, GINOV and RERD expenditures be promoted, political stability and institutional quality be maintained, and clean economic growth strategies be adopted in order to help the BRICS countries reduce sectoral risks, create a sustainable environment, and decarbonize their respective economies.
KEYWORDS
BRICS economies, carbon neutrality, composite risk index, environmental policy, green innovation, renewable energy research and development.
