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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) allow global economies to establish nationally determined plans to track ecological and economic sustainability at regional and international levels. While renewables are proven effective ecological sustainability tools, they might not comprehensively achieve climate change mitigation without emissions control regulations available in the combined policy toolbox, largely ignored by mainstream research. Therefore, we empirically assess the combined effect of renewable electricity output, stringent environmental regulations, and coal consumption in an attempt to acquire sustainable ecosystems via employing second-generation methodological approaches to ten selected OECD members' data during 1990–2015. We revealed long-term equilibrium among our study variables, implying that our variables maintain inherent stability. Also, the environmental Kuznets Curve notion is verified in the long term. Notably, we found that renewable energy output and stringent environmental regulations effectively mitigate ecological footprint and carbon emissions, whereas coal consumption boosts them. However, as the degree of coal consumption-driven carbon emissions promotion impact exceeded that of the emissions reduction impact of renewable energy output, simply ramping up the deployment of renewable energy solutions would be insufficient for climate change mitigation targets. Instead, a comprehensive climate policy inclusive of energy transformation and environmental regulations would be indispensable. While all the under-analysis variables unveil significant impacts merely in the long term, their respective short-term policies would be ineffective. We suggest implementing marketable and non-marketable environmental laws and deploying renewable solutions for achieving SDGs involving climate action and universal access to affordable alternative energy to guide a green and sustainable future. [Display omitted] • Applied advanced methods robust to cross-section dependency and slope heterogeneity. • Renewable electricity output improves ecological sustainability in the long term. • Stringent environmental regulations drove long-term ecological sustainability. • Coal consumption impeded the ecological quality. • EKC notion is found valid from the long-term perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]