Tracking the roadmaps to sustainability: what do the symmetric effects of eco-digitalization, green technology, green finance, and renewable energy portend for China?

The post-COP26 era provides policy directions for economies to track the ways of achieving sustainable environment as a lasting solution to the ravaging impacts of global warming. The call for global sustainability heightens the criticality of digital economy which is recently evolving in environmental empirics. This study provides the first empirical evidence advancing the symmetric effects of eco-digitalization, green technology, green finance, and renewable energy on environmental sustainability in China within the novel STIRPAT model. The study explores the ARDL model to evaluate the stated hypotheses based on quarterly data from 1995Q1 to 2019Q4. The preliminary analyses reveal the vulnerability of the Chinese environment to surging greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Besides, the structural break unit root anchored on Zivot–Andrew reveals prominent breakpoint years. The essential roles of urbanization and affluence are empirically investigated. Robustness checks on the long-run impacts are conducted based on FMOLS, DOLS, and CCR coupled with the causality analysis examined based on Toda–Yamamoto estimator. The findings uncover that eco-digitalization, green technology, green finance, and renewable energy promote environmental sustainability in China by mitigating CO2 emissions and ecological footprint. Conversely, urbanization and affluence escalate both pollutants. Further, causalities running from bidirectional to unidirectional nexuses among the variables are well documented. Policy insights that drive the paths to sustainability in China are suggested based on the findings.