Whether trade openness advances or undermines environmental quality remains a contested issue in environmental economics. This study examines the relationship between trade openness and multidimensional green economy performance across 157 countries during 2000-2020. Unlike most trade - environment studies that rely primarily on CO2 emissions, green performance is measured using a composite Green Economy Index based on Sarma's (2016) achievement framework, encompassing climate mitigation and social equity, sectoral decarbonization, ESG-oriented investment, and environmental health. To capture both heterogeneous predictive relationships and dynamic adjustment processes, the analysis combines panel causality techniques with a Panel Vector Autoregression (PVAR) framework. The results reveal no uniform global pattern: significant predictive relationships appear only in a subset of countries and vary across income groups and regions. Openness to green predictability is more common in low-income economies, whereas the reverse direction is more prevalent in high-income countries. The PVAR estimates indicate that trade openness exerts a positive, statistically significant short-run effect on green economy performance (beta = 0.075, p = 0.019), whereas the reverse effect remains statistically insignificant. Overall, trade openness appears to facilitate green transition in some countries, although the strength and direction of this relationship vary considerably across countries and development contexts.
International agricultural trade redistributes environmental burdens across borders, yet one cost remains unquantified: the loss of belowground ecosystem multifunctionality (BEMF) in producing nations, and the degree to which climate warming amplifies it. We provide the first global quantification of trade-embodied BEMF loss, coupling 15 soil biological and biogeochemical indicators with the FABIO multi-regional input-output framework (155 matched exporting nations, 123 commodity sectors) and CMIP6 projections under three emissions scenarios to 2100. International trade embodies 14.7% of global cropland BEMF production. Thermally stressed exporters (mean annual temperature > 16.4 degrees C) sustain 37% lower per-hectare BEMF than climatically stable exporters, yet direct a larger share of their production into trade (18.1% vs 10.8%), so supply chains draw disproportionately on the most ecologically depleted regions. Export-driven hotspots concentrate in Brazil, Sudan, India, and Eswatini, with the Brazil-to-China soybean corridor the single largest transfer. Projected global BEMF declines range from 6.2% under low emissions to 14.5% under high emissions by 2100, with the steepest zonal loss (23.8%) in currently cooler regions sitting on the steep portion of the temperature-BEMF curve. The ecological cost of an agricultural import therefore depends not only on what or how much is traded, but on where and under what thermal conditions it is grown. We argue for integrating belowground indicators into consumption-based accounting and applying a Climate Exacerbation Factor within climate-adjusted supply chain governance aligned with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Financial systems can intensify environmental pressures through economic expansion but can also support clean technologies, renewable energy investment, and efficient resource allocation. This study examines how financial development, financial inclusion, and digital financialisation jointly relate to environmental sustainability across 30 OECD economies from 2014 to 2024. It develops an integrated financial architecture framework in which these dimensions represent the complementary functions of financial capacity, accessibility, and efficiency. Carbon emissions, ecological footprint, and renewable energy consumption capture aspects of environmental performance. Cross-Sectionally Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lag and Dynamic Common Correlated Effects Mean Group estimators account for cross-sectional dependence, country heterogeneity, and dynamic adjustment. The findings reveal nonlinear associations between financial development and environmental outcomes. Financial development is associated with higher carbon emissions and ecological pressure at lower levels but improved environmental performance beyond estimated turning points, while renewable energy consumption follows a U-shaped pattern. Financial inclusion and digital financialisation are consistently associated with better environmental performance, with digital financialisation exhibiting the strongest relationship. Institutional quality reinforces favourable outcomes, whereas energy intensity constrains them. Robustness analyses using a principal-component-based composite financial architecture index, alternative estimators, threshold validation, and subsample estimations produce broadly consistent results. The findings indicate that the environmental implications of finance depend on its expansion, accessibility, digital efficiency, institutional setting, and structural conditions. Policies should therefore align financial development, inclusion, digitalisation, institutional quality, and energy efficiency to advance environmental sustainability.
Citizen participation is central to the long-term governance of urban green spaces, yet evidence on why residents engage, what enables or constrains involvement, and what sustains participation remains fragmented. Following PRISMA-ScR, this review synthesized 86 English-language peer-reviewed empirical studies published between 1997 and 2025 and identified through Web of Science, Scopus, and backward reference screening. The findings distinguish four motivational domains: personal and experiential, social and relational, value-based and affective, and civic or problem-driven. Whether motivation developed into participation depended on institutional support, social mobilization, spatial opportunity structures, and project design, while limited capacity, distrust, governance barriers, and material constraints impeded involvement. Continued participation was reinforced by trust, ownership, collective identity, learning, and adaptive capacity, but weakened by maintenance burdens, unstable resources, unresolved conflict, and weak monitoring. The evidence was concentrated in parks and community gardens and in the Global North, limiting transferability across green-space and governance contexts. We integrate these findings into a process-oriented framework linking willingness, initial involvement, continued participation, and long-term stewardship. The framework highlights how meaningful influence, accessible participation pathways, trusted relationships, and practical support can enable more inclusive and durable urban green space governance.
