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The global environment faces the issue of sustainability arising from the persistent growth rates in general production levels. Hence, there is the need to resolve the growth environment conflicts in order to enhance the sustainability of the current and future generations. This study presents the first empirical analysis on the dynamic impacts of non-renewable and renewable energy, total resource rents, population growth, human capital, and financial inclusion on environmental quality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) with the conditioning roles of technological progress and income level. The empirical evidence is based on a two-step system generalized method of moments (SYS-GMM) with forward orthogonal deviations for 42 countries in the SSA region from 2004 to 2018. The following results are established from the empirical analyses. First, renewable energy emerges as a promoter of environmental quality through its reducing impacts on carbon emissions per capita (co2pc). Second, other regressors turn out to impede environmental quality by contributing to the surge in co2pc. Third, the robustness checks analyses, which consider different variants of carbon emissions as outcome variables, revealing that the main results are robust and empirically supported to explain the variations in the level of pollutants in the region. Fourth, the impacts of technological progress from both direct (unconditional) and interactive (conditional) angles mitigate co2pc while income promotes it. On the policy front, promoting investment in renewable energy and structuring human capital development plans to promote green growth are seen as sacrosanct towards achieving a sustainable environment in the region.

The present millennium records the most devastating effects of global warming than what was evident in the pre-industrial era. The pervasive effects of global warming have raised concerns about the sustainability of the present and future generations. Hence, researchers are working assiduously towards proffering the most effective method of halting the surging emissions from global, regional, and national angles. This study contributes to the extant literature by providing the first empirical verification of how renewable energy, technological innovations, trade openness, and transport services impact carbon emissions in Germany. The empirical evidence is anchored on annual time series data from 1990 to 2020 estimated using the novel nonlinear ARDL to explore the positive and negative shocks associated with the short and long-run nexus. The wavelet coherence estimator is equally for ascertaining the multiple time scales in the time series and extends the knowledge frontier to the literature. The following findings are eminent from the overall analyses. First, long-run cointegration is supported among the variables of interest Second, only the adverse effects of renewable energy and technology are substantial enough to mitigate carbon emissions. The trade-induced emissions are established with the positive impacts of trade openness on carbon emissions. Transport services contribute significantly to carbon emissions in the long-run and short-run periods. However, mitigating effects of small magnitude are apparent in the long-run due to the perceived transition to green transportation. Policy implications supporting the transition to 100% renewable energy and green transportation are significant steps towards achieving Germany's carbon neutrality target.