The role of technology innovation and renewable energy in reducing environmental degradation in Malaysia: A step towards sustainable environment

Abstract The current industrial era has turned into a rapidly evolved world that relies abundantly on technological advancements and robotics intelligence. However, the trends of global economic appraisals showed that the process of advancement is mostly accompanied by environmental degradation. Therefore, this research studies the connection of renewable energy and technological innovations in affecting ecological footprint and carbon dioxide emission in Malaysia. In doing so, the study employs the bootstrapped autoregressive distributed lag (BARDL) model for scrutinizing the connection between environmental degradation proxies. The findings disclose that the consumption of renewable energy helps to reduce the level of environmental degradation. In addition, technology innovation also helps to reduce both carbon emission and ecological footprint. Moreover, the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis is also validated for the country by showing the inverted U-shape link of economic growth with the both environmental degradation proxies. These findings give a benchmark for the policymakers to encourage local and foreign investors to invest more in renewable energy production and technology innovation in Malaysian economy whereas the results demand policy implication in the form of increased emphasis on the utilization of green energy via renewables especially in domestic businesses.