Taking into account factors such as unfavorable climate changes, shrinking fossil fuel resources, low energy efficiency, and the pace of population growth, the transformation towards green and renewable energy is one of the most important goals and challenges facing the world. The energy sector is the source of about 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions and energy-related emissions are reaching new record levels. For the energy transition to succeed, innovation at the level of technology, business processes and policies (local, national, and international) are necessary. Therefore, the aim of this article is to analyze the size, structure, and dynamics of research on innovations in the field of green and renewable energy in the last decade in order to identify the main topics and research trends in this field. The authors conducted a bibliometric review based on the PRISMA guidance together with visualization analysis based on the VOSviewer software. For this purpose, the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC) database was used, and based on defined inclusion criteria, the authors selected 1144 records for bibliographic analysis. The database was subjected to a performance analysis from the perspective of the number of publications per year, dominant countries, and journals. Further, science mapping was employed to analyze such features of the publications as co-citations, co-occurrences, and bibliometric coupling. Based on the results, gaps in green and renewable energy innovations were identified and issues for future research were defined and recommended.

Current research assesses the impact of industrialization and the renewable energy sector on greenhouse gas emissions, proxied by CO₂ emissions in Europe and Central Asia. We rely on a two-step system GMM estimator on a sample of 48 countries over the period 2000–2018. Empirical results show that industrialization has a positive effect on CO₂ emissions: a 10% increase in industry value added as % of GDP leads to an increase of 2.6% in CO₂ emissions. In contrast, renewable energy mitigates CO₂ emissions. Ten percentage points increase in renewable energy consumption reduces CO₂ emissions per capita by 2.2%. The interaction term between renewable energy and industry value added is negative, suggesting that renewable energy consumption compensates for the negative effect of industrialization on environmental quality. Our main results also confirm the U-shaped inverted relationship between GDP per capita and CO₂ emissions. Our study has a number of policy implications and avenues for future research.

This study examines the long-term relationship between carbon emissions and a number of researchers engaged in Research and Development (R&D), economic development, foreign capital inflows, renewable energy and population growth in 26 countries between 1995 and 2015. Pedroni’s panel cointegration test confirms the cointegrating relationship between the variables. Long-term elasticities are derived from FMOLS regression. Researchers in R&D and renewable energy are negatively and significantly related to carbon emissions. There is a positive and significant long-term relationship between GDPs per capita and CO₂ and between the FDI and CO₂. Dumitrescu and Hurlin’s panel causality test revealed unidirectional causality running from economic development to carbon emissions and feedback hypotheses between the FDI and CO₂ and between renewable energy and CO₂.