Green path towards environmental sustainability: integrating role of energy equity, environmental justice, and energy transition in selected high-income economies

Abstract The globe has made significant progress to facilitate the entire populace, which pushed it into several challenges, and it is impossible to come back without understanding the actual problems. Environmental sustainability (ES) has recently become a leading task at the forefront of empiricists, who are wondering about some key solutions to deal with it. This study helps to break the suspense and make known the real difficulties (income, technology, and energy equity) & their best alternatives (urbanization, environmental justice, and energy transition) in the case of 39 high-income economies covering 2011–2023. The most reliable estimators are being used to investigate the study’s objectives, i.e., the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS), Dynamic Ordinary Least Square (DOLS), Quantile Generalized Method of Moments (Q-GMM), and Instrument Variable Two Stages Least Square (IV-2SLS). The research outcomes illustrate ES decay through income, technology, and energy equity changes. Under the FMOLS, environmental justice and energy transition improve the sustainability level by 0.331% & 0.482%, respectively. Equally, urbanization performs well in increasing the ES, but its effect remains insignificant for specified economies. The environmental justice’s mediating effect on energy transition and equity shows significant support in ES. The study’s leading initiative to introduce “the environmental sustainability curve” along with the “load capacity curve” is considerable. Regarding outcomes, the current work proposes some green implications to strengthen the sustainability theme.