From Environmental Awareness to Ecological Footprint: Nonlinear Roles of Information Diffusion, Social Trust, and Recycling in Advancing SDGs in OECD Countries

ABSTRACT Environmental sustainability remains a central challenge in achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs), as rising ecological pressures continue to exceed the regenerative capacity of natural systems. This study investigates the nonlinear and distribution‐dependent determinants of ecological footprint (EF) by focusing on the roles of environmental awareness potential, social trust, economic growth, information diffusion, and recycling behavior across 38 OECD countries over the period 2000–2023. To capture heterogeneous and asymmetric relationships, the analysis employs an integrated empirical framework combining quantile regression (QR), quantile‐on‐quantile regression (QQR), method of moments quantile regression (MMQR), and wavelet‐quantile regression (WQR). The findings reveal substantial distributional heterogeneity across quantiles. Environmental awareness potential exhibits a nonlinear effect, reducing ecological pressure at lower quantiles but increasing it at higher levels. Social trust shows predominantly positive associations with ecological footprint across environmental regimes, whereas information diffusion exhibits mixed and context‐dependent associations. Recycling behavior is predominantly associated with lower ecological footprint, although its mitigating effect weakens under higher ecological pressure levels. Economic growth is consistently associated with a higher ecological footprint. Robustness analyses based on MMQR broadly confirm the distribution‐dependent findings, whereas WQR further reveals their time–frequency heterogeneity. These findings provide policy‐relevant insights aligned with SDGs 7, 9, 12, 13, and 17, suggesting that the effectiveness of environmental awareness and information diffusion depends on stronger environmental governance and behavioral interventions, while strengthening recycling and circular economy practices remains essential for promoting more sustainable development pathways.