Analysis of the Impact of the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Component of Environmental Resilience on the New European Development Model

Abstract

Population well-being is a strategic goal for every political program. We are currently living in the new logic of sustainability which means at the same time economic efficiency, social responsibility and ecological resilience. Two of the key drivers of the new development model of the European Union are ecological and digital resilience. Ecological resilience means promoting the values of the circular economy but also neutrality in terms of emissions. To this end, an ambitious program called the Green Deal has been launched and is being implemented at European level. More and more experts are interested in following the evolution of greenhouse gas emissions and determining the factors with a high influence on their level. The identification of causalities or the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and the most significant variables has become an interesting research topic. In order to contribute to mitigating the climate changes, both policy makers and entrepreneurs put more and more frequently in their agendas subjects as Gross Domestic Product per capita, Research & Development expenditures per capita, domestic consumption of fossil energy material per capita and red meat production per capita. The authors of this paper set out to analyze and offer some relevant insights linked to correlation and causalities between greenhouse gas emissions volumes and global warming based on Pearson correlation coefficient and the identification of similar countries using the combination of clusters in the Dendrogram using Ward Linkage. Data from the EUROSTAT database with a range from 2013 and until 2019 with a grouping of 27-EU countries were used for the calculation the Pearson correlation coefficient and the combination of clusters in the Dendrogram using Ward Linkage. The findings show there is a negative correlation between both the gross domestic product per capita, research and development per capita and greenhouse gas emissions for high income countries and generally positive correlation between both the domestic consumption of fossil energy materials, the production of red meat per capita towards greenhouse gas emissions.