The role of government effectiveness, technological innovations, natural resource protection on carbon emissions in Gulf Cooperation Council region: A pathway for achieving sustainable development goals by 2030.

Government effectiveness, technological innovations and natural resources protection could play a critical role in carbon emission reductions and environment sustainability. The United Nations set 2023 as the years for the assessment of the achievement of the SDGs and as the period of assessment draws closer, understanding the progress made by the GCC become critical considering the region's heavy dependence on hydrocarbons. Employing Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and Moments of Quantile Regression (MMQR) models with data spanning from 2000 to 2022, this study explored the role of government effectiveness, technological innovations, natural resource protection and carbon emissions in the GCC. Both the GMM and MMQR results presented government effectiveness, technological innovation and biocapacity as significant influencers of CO2 emissions in the GCC. Whiles the GMM results found government effectiveness to exhibit lesser effect on CO2 emissions, the MMQR estimates revealed a strong positive effect. With strong coefficients, the MMQR estimates found biocapacity to exhibit significant positive distributional effect on CO2 emission, underscoring the relevance of effective governance and biocapacity protection in achieving the global sustainable development goals. Though the results highlight a challenging situation for a collective achievement of the SDGs by 2023, the governance effectiveness can be used to expand environmental policy instruments on polluting activities while providing incentives for the effusion of technological innovations that enhance the progress of the SDGs.