The impacts of natural resources rents diversification, uncertainty, and environmental technologies on ecological sustainability: Empirical evidence from OECD countries

Existing literature indicates the influence of natural resources rents on environmental sustainability, but ignores the potential effects of natural resources rents diversification. In addition, the recent proliferation of environmental technologies and uncertainties create a complicated condition for humans to protect the ecology. An assessment of the impacts of the above-mentioned factors on the ecological system may provide relevant implications for the government in achieving sustainable development goals. This paper is the first study that constructs an index to measure the diversification of natural resources rents and applies it to an extended STIRPAT model. The study measures the effects of natural resources rents diversification, environmental technologies, uncertainties alongside natural resources rents, trade openness, and income on ecological footprint and ecological deficit for 30 OECD nations from 1990 to 2019. The results demonstrate that natural resources rents diversification exacerbates ecological ruin, especially in less ecologically degraded countries. In contrast, natural resources rents lead to severe ecological degradation in more ecologically degraded countries. We find both uncertainties and environmental technologies generate ecological improvements in OECD countries although the effects vary significantly across ecological levels. Target policy suggestions from the perspectives of natural resources rents, uncertainty, and environmental technology are proposed to mitigate the negative externalities of the former factors and to reinforce the roles of the latter factors.