For decades, renewable energy consumption has been presented as the ultimate solution to reduce pollutant gas emissions. However, their production, marketing, and, above all, consumption are not entirely climate neutral, so society needs new practices, such as circular energy, to achieve a more efficient energy transition (Khan et al., 2021a; Khan et al., 2021d). This study aims at exploring the effects of energy intensity, renewable energy consumption and forestation on CO2 emissions for developed and developing countries. Owing to cross-country income disparity, the data were categorized into four distinct groups: lower, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high-income over the period of 1980–2018. The Pedroni and Fisher-Johnson estimators of pooled data are employed for determining the plausible presence of a long-run co-integrating relationship between model variables. For all four country groups, Pedroni cointegration testing results reveal a significant long-run association between CO2 emission and its determinants. However, the Fisher-Johansen estimator yield mixed results, with low- and lower-middle income country groups outperforming the other two groups. However, the magnitude of this long-run association is less substantial, particularly in case of renewable energy consumption and forestation. For all country groups, energy intensity turns out to be the most influential long-run determinant of CO2 emissions, holding a positive coefficient value ranging from 0.30 to 1.31. Renewable energy consumption is the second most important long-run determinant of CO2 emissions. In case of forestation, the series imparts (statistically) significant long-run effects only for lower-middle-income countries. The overall results back the idea of curtailing the existing levels of energy intensity and encouraging the exploration and the use of renewable energy sources as a policy tool against controlling the prevalent situation of carbon-based emissions in our subject group of countries.

The institutional framework designed to protect the environment demands a growing involvement of companies. The new environmental paradigm drives the business community to embrace corporate sustainability more broadly and effectively. This trend is especially pronounced in the petroleum sector since, to a greater degree than in other industries, modern society demands that wealth creation be conducted while guaranteeing social and environmental wellbeing. To achieve this aim, it is necessary to implement an environmental management model that links sustainability planning with a control and supervision system. One of the most effective is the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard approach. This method will be used in this article to evaluate the sustainable performance of a Spanish company whose activity is focused on the marketing and distribution of petroleum products. The objective of this article is to analyze the environmental management of the hydrocarbon company and whether the four perspectives of its strategic vision have satisfactorily incorporated variables that promote sustainability. 2021 is the reference year for the indicator values, which will be compared with the target values for 2022. The results show that, while financial performance reveals a margin for improvement, as well as staff education and training in sustainability, the degree of environmental satisfaction of consumers is acceptable.

This paper defines a methodology for the economic feasibility analysis of a floating offshore wind farm composed of tensioned leg platforms, which are part of the EU ARCWIND research project. In this context, the phases and subphases of its life-cycle process are considered to deal with aspects such as bathymetry, characteristics of the platforms, distance from the farm to shore, distance from the farm to port and offshore wind speed. All the costs and other external parameters such as capital cost, electric tariff, interest rate, percentage of financing and corporate tax have been analysed to calculate the internal rate of return, net present value, discounted pay-back period and levelized cost of energy of the farm. This work studies a farm composed of TLP offshore wind platforms designed by CENTEC and located at Ribadeo in Spain. Results indicate the costs and the economic feasibility of this platform for deep waters. They indicate that the platform is economically feasible for the location selected.

The significance of sustainability has been increasing and also financial organizations adopted a broad view of their purposes to serve all stakeholders. It is important to respond to their social impact. The purpose to empower the digital economy can be achieved through being reliable and enhancing access to financial services to include everyone in the digital economy while cash is used less frequently. The digital transformation can have the potential for expanding access of disadvantaged or unbanked groups to financial services and reduce poverty. Financial inclusion aims at integrating economic agents into the financial system in order to improve economic development but also quality of life. Financial inclusion through digitalization enables accessible and available financial services to people and companies and hence, facilitates to implementation of Sustainable Development Goals. This paper explores the relationship between digitalization, financial inclusion, poverty and sustainability for Balkan countries. It discusses the potential of financial inclusion for economic development. The paper concludes that digitalization improves accessibility to financial services and contributes to the accomplishment of Sustainable Development Goals. In addition, Remittance inflow, globalization and compliance with the law (measured as role of law index) decreasing poverty in these countries.