Does Uncertainty Stimulate Energy-Environment Nexus? Shedding Light on Infrastructure Investments Toward Sustainable Development in Middle East

Using panel data on Middle East countries for the period 2007-2020, the study sheds light on the roles of infrastructure investments in mitigating climate change impacts. We introduce the extended Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKCI) framework to the extant literature on energy-growth-environment nexuses, highlighting the importance of financing infrastructure development in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by the United Nations. Since climate change has been the ultimate challenge to the world’s economy, the study’s empirical evidence is particularly critical to countries with a high vulnerability like the MENA region. Our findings also imply the economic costs of climate change where multitrillion investments are required for financing sustainable infrastructure systems including energy, telecommunication, and transport. The study provides critical implications to policymakers with future research agendas. Overall, we argue that infrastructure investments and development are indispensable factors in both theoretical and empirical settings for examining the trajectories between energy, climate, environment, and sustainable development with the extended EKCI framework for future studies. The empirical findings for the MENA economies are validated through panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) estimations and other econometric approaches