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This study seeks to investigate how natural resources rents impact environmental sustainability measured by CO2 emissions and PM2.5 air pollution in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) economies from 1995 to 2019. To enhance robust policy implications, natural resources are decomposed into disaggregated (coal, gas, oil, forest, and mineral rents) and aggregated (total natural resources rents) indicators. Besides, the intervening roles of affluence, urbanization, and green policies vectoring green technological innovation, green finance, green energy, and waste management within the theoretical underpinning of STIRPAT model are considered. The empirical verification is anchored on second-generation estimators entailing Common Correlated Effects Mean Group, Augmented Mean Group, and Panel Quantile Regression. Similarly, Fully Modified OLS is employed to gauge the country-specific effects amidst varying robustness analyses. The fallouts from the analyses reveal that natural resources rents inhibit the attainments of environmental sustainability in BRICS economies by positively driving CO2 emissions and PM2.5 air pollution. Conversely, green policies are observed to substantially drive environmental sustainability by mitigating both pollutants whereas affluence and urbanization escalate them. The distributional effects from Panel Quantile Regression and Fully Modified OLS corroborate the main findings divergently. Additionally, two channels of causality, including unidirectional and bidirectional nexuses, are apparent from the estimated models. Policy measures are suggested based on the empirical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article articulates the historical entanglement of Ireland's big tech ecosystem with earlier forms of economic development and state-sanctioned polluting practices, particularly focusing on strategies for attracting multinational companies since the 1960s. The outsourcing of polluting multinational industries to Ireland's rural regions has a long history, one tied into fault-lines of the country's postcolonial condition and developmental economy in the 1970s and 1980s. During this era of economic liberalisation, Ireland's environmental politics were frequently organised against the outsourcing of toxic chemical, pharmaceutical, and technological industries to rural Ireland. Ireland's position as a western European nation-state undoubtedly means that wealth accumulated via these industries merits complicity in the global supply chains sustaining "green" extractivism in the Global South. But rural Ireland also bears an uneven share of responsibility for these industries, whose destructive externalities are often imposed on these places through large-scale infrastructures. Historical struggles for environmental justice in these rural sites foreground access to land, livelihoods, health, and cultures of place. Contributing to recent debates on the colonial endurances of contemporary "green" development, we argue that these rural movements should be a starting point for a "just" transition attuned to anti-imperialist goals in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]