Arvind Goswami, Rajesh Kumar Jangir, Harmanpreet Singh Kapoor, Vijay Kumar Chattu
ABSTRACT This study examines the impact of clean energy consumption on environmental quality, supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7, which aims to ensure access to clean, affordable energy for all. The Auto‐Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model is used for Japan, and the Fourier ARDL for China and India, followed by a Granger Causality test. The ecological footprint is selected as a dependent variable because it provides a comprehensive picture of demand for natural resources, which, in turn, reflects environmental quality. Renewable energy consumption (REC) is treated as an independent variable representing clean energy use, which is the main focus of SDG 7. A few other relevant variables are selected that affect the environment's quality, such as gross domestic product (GDP), population density, gross fixed capital formation (GCF), and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions. Data were collected from World Development Indicators and Our World in Data for the period 1970–2022. Asian powers China, India, and Japan have been selected for the study as they are Asia's three biggest economies and CO 2 emitters. The results indicate that REC significantly lowers EFP in India, China, and Japan by 0.37%, 0.21%, and 1.51%, respectively. With higher economic growth, more investment should be in clean energy projects.