Environmental Sustainability within Attaining Sustainable Development Goals: The Role of Digitalization and the Transport Sector

Abstract

Accepting sustainable development goals leads to the reorientation of all sectors at all levels. The European Union (EU) actively accepts a vast range of policies to achieve environmental sustainability due to declining carbon dioxide emissions. Within the Green Deal Policy, and in particular the Fit for 55 packages, the EU declared ambitious goals to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by at least 55% from the transport industry by 2030 and 100% by 2035. These goals require introducing appropriate digital technologies into the ecologically friendly functioning of the transport sector to attain sustainable development. This paper aims at analyzing the impact of digitalization on environmental sustainability by providing an effective transport sector that functions with minimum environmental degradation. The object of research is the EU countries for the period 2006–2020. This study applies the panel-corrected standard errors technique to achieve the paper’s aims. The findings allow us to conclude that digitalization is conducive to environmental sustainability. Thus, digital inclusion, the input of the IT sector to GDP, and e-commerce have direct negative and statistically significant linear effects on carbon dioxide emissions. Growth of digital inclusion, input of the IT sector to GDP, and enterprises with web sales by one point allow for decreasing CO2 emissions by 0.136, 2.289, and 0.266, respectively. However, key enablers and digital public services for citizens have a nonlinear, statistically significant impact on carbon dioxide emissions. The findings could be the basis for upgrading incentive policies for reducing carbon dioxide emissions.