Higher education attainment, multinational corporations, and environmental sustainability: Isolating the carbon footprint in the European Union and the UK

Green sustainability is one of the most acute modern global goals as it is on the intersection between economic development, human well-being, and the environment. Despite the general belief that increased education can raise green awareness and green innovation, and multinational corporations, proxied by foreign direct investment, will be the pathways to cleaner technology dissemination, their net effects on the environment have been a hypothetical zone and an inconclusive result. This conflict is very pronounced in developed economies like the European Union and the United Kingdom where robust climate commitments are coexistent with quantifiable carbon externalities. Motivated by the limited empirical ambiguity, on whether knowledge growth and integration of multinationals mitigate or aggravate carbon footprint, this research investigates the connection between tertiary education, foreign direct investment, and environmental sustainability in 27 countries within the European Union and the United Kingdom during the years 2014 to 2023. Dynamic Panel Heterogeneous Model with Pooled Mean Group estimator is used to estimate the relationships of long run equilibrium and short run dynamics with cross country heterogeneity. The findings demonstrate that in the long-term higher education attainment and foreign direct investment have a positive and statistically significant relationship with carbon footprint, which supports the idea that scale effects and consumption effects could reduce the possible efficiency benefits. In contrast, economic growth and renewable energy adoption are found to reduce carbon footprint significantly, indicating evidence of cleaner production restructuring and energy transition. These findings imply that expansion in human capital and multinational production activity may reinforce carbon intensive patterns in the absence of strong environmental governance. The study therefore recommends sustained green oriented growth strategies, regulatory harmonization and environmental accountability for multinational operations, and the integration of sustainability competencies within educational programmes to better align human capital development and investment flows with long term decarbonization goals.