Impacts of Renewable Energy on CO2 Emission: Evidence from the Visegrad Group Countries

EU policies aim to develop renewable energy share in both production and consumption of total energy and increase the efforts to mitigate climate change. As relatively new EU members, the Visegrad countries aimed to adopt these targets. Therefore, climate change mitigation and CO2 emissions reduction are important issues in Visegrad countries. In this paper, we examine the renewable energy consumption and CO2 emissions relationship in the Visegrad countries. We use the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS) model to estimate the long-run relationship between the variables using annual data from the period of 2000–2018. The variables used are CO2 emissions, GDP per capita, renewable energy consumption and urban population. The results show that there is cointegration among the variables. The estimated FMOLS model shows that GDP and population increase CO2 consumption, and renewable energy consumption decreases CO2 emissions. Results show that renewable energy consumption has a decreasing effect on CO2 emissions.