Since the 'shale revolution' of the late 2000s, unconventional oil and gas extraction (UOGE) has been hailed by many as a boon for local and regional economies, workers, and property owners. While energy social science has documented many realities that counter this narrative - natural resource dependent economies, 'boom and bust' cycles of the energy industry, and 'resource curse'- there is less research examining economic impacts of UOGE for small-scale property owners. While some large-scale property owners lease their land, minerals, or water rights to oil and gas companies in exchange for royalties, other property owners are not able or do not wish to do so. Yet, nearby UOGE may negatively impact property values and thus threaten people's sense of economic stability. Several legal mechanisms - forced pooling, split estate, and rule of capture - significantly restrict the rights of many property owners while privileging other property rights. While property ownership represents a privileged status, it is the largest investment many Americans will make and is relied upon for retirement planning, financial stability, and transfer of generational wealth. Yet, despite the importance of property ownership, particularly home ownership, little is known about how proximity to oil and gas development impacts small-scale property owners. This paper analyzes how UOGE impacts property owners' sense of economic precarity. We conducted surveys of hundreds of affected households and interviews with 66 property owners in two Colorado towns that have experienced heavy UOGE. We find that the current regulatory regimes disempower small-scale property owners, create economic vulnerability, and ultimately privilege property rights of mineral owners and operators over others - creating uncompensated for small-scale property owners. We explore important implications, including the need for more responsive and community-based governance processes.

Environmental stability improved during the covid 19 pandemic when production and industrial activities, and natural resources depletion processes stopped during the lockdown environment worldwide; however, based on the judgment of COP26 and the recent COP27, environmental degradation increased in the world in post-pandemic; therefore, policymakers and researchers re-focused their attention on the determinants of CO2 in economies. Hence, this study investigates the nexus of natural resource rents, including oil rents, mineral rents, and coal rents, on the carbon emissions of upper-middle-income economies from 1984 to 2021. The study included economic growth and renewable energy as additional determinants. We have presented detailed time series methods that aid in examining the modeled variables characteristics in the current research, i.e., ADF and ADF-GLS for a unit root in the data variables and considering their stationarity, Johansen cointegration for long-term cointegration among variables, FMOLS, DOLS and CCR for the long run elasticities between dependent and independent variables and Granger causality test in our range of methods. Robustness checks analysis is done through a non-parametric approach by quantile regression and robust regression analysis. Our results exhibit that two natural resource rents that are oil rents and coal rents, have adverse impacts on carbon emissions, and both are positive and significant. In contrast, mineral rents have no statistical significance and role in the carbon emissions of upper-middle-income economies. Moreover, economic growth and renewable energy also positively and significantly impact carbon emissions. Granger causality analysis exerts that natural resources rents, except for mineral rents, economic growth, and renewable energy, all granger causes CO2 emissions, and the feedback is also true. The relevant findings are suitable for policymakers in upper-middle-income economies to ensure environmental sustainability in upper-middle-income economies.

Constant exploitation of natural resources has resulted from the industrialization and urbanization of society. One of the possible causes of the COVID-19 pandemic is an ecological disturbance caused by excessive resource exploitation. Countries worldwide have taken precautionary measures to limit the spread of this disease because of its highly infectious nature: lockdowns, quarantines, curfews, etc. This paper explores the impacts of energy depletion and the human development index on natural resources, considering the roles of CO emissions and economic growth in China from 1971 to 2019. We apply advanced economic modeling using the Phillips-Ouliaris test for integration, Gaussian identity mixed-effects Generalized Linear Model, and Robust GEE population-averaged model for long-run estimates. Results explain that CO emissions and economic growth devalue natural resources, while the human development index and energy depletion increase them. Depletion of natural resources occurs due to overexploitation and overuse of natural resources, as well as unsustainable planning and waste. In the case of natural resources that man uses to make other resources, such as dams, roads, sports complexes, etc., these are considered human-made resources. It is, therefore, essential to develop human resources as a part of the natural resource development process. Research limitations and future directions are discussed.

In recent times, industrialized economies have focused more on achieving a sustainable environment while maintaining economic prosperity. However, it is clear from the current research that natural resource exploitation and decentralization substantially affect environmental quality. To experimentally validate such data, the current study examines decentralized economies during the previous three decades (1990-2020). This study discovered the existence of long-term cointegration between carbon emissions, economic growth, revenue decentralization, spending decentralization, natural resources, and human capital using panel data econometric techniques. The findings are based on non-parametric techniques, indicating that economic growth and revenue decentralization are the primary barriers to meeting the COP26 objective. Human capital drives down carbon emissions and contributes to meeting the COP26 objective. On the contrary, decentralization of spending and natural resources has a mixed influence on carbon emissions across quantiles. This report recommends investing in human capital, education, and research & development to speed up COP26's target accomplishment.

In the contemporary world, the importance of natural resources is increasing day by day especially due to extraordinary circumstances, i.e., COVID-19 and global conflicts. The abundance of natural resource is considered competitive advantage and crucial for sustainable development. However, the role of natural resources can be questionable especially if its impact on the economy is negative. Sustainable use of natural resources is currently the biggest challenge for governance. Following these footprints, the study aims to revisit a novel perspective of natural resources in the context of global conflicts using data from Asian economies for the period of 1996-2020. In this pursuit, this study investigates how governance balances macroeconomic variables with sustainable development to account for effective climate change adaptation, mitigation efforts and integral to control conflicts. The second-generation test of CIPS and CADF are used to deal with cross-sectional dependence issues and Westerlund cointegration to estimate long-run relationships. Furthermore, the long-run coefficients are estimated by the PMG estimator using dynamic panel ARDL approach. The findings confirm that surpassing the threshold level of governance is essential to promote environmental quality and preservation of natural resources. The region needs to promote steward policy for resources. This can take the form of nationalizing resource assets, increasing taxes and royalties on resource extraction to ensure sustainable development. The handlers need to design polices supportive to renewable energy consumption, endorse IT based industry solution, encourage high-tech inward FDI, promote green financing and support sustainable development.

The global pandemic of covid-19 affected human lives and the global environment. Further, literature on the nexus of natural resources and economic growth, initiating the pandemic in the 21st century has confronted policymakers with uncertainty. This requires revisiting the link between natural resources and the economic performance of the South Asian economies. For this purpose, the present study has tried to investigate the role of natural resources in the economic growth of the aggregate South Asian economies during the Covid-19 challenge. The analysis has been completed by a novel approach of MMQR taking data from 1980 to 2021. The oil rents have negatively affected the economic growth may be due to its lower demand during the pandemic caused by lockdown activity. The trade and electricity produced from renewable improve the economic performance of the designated sample economies. The results provide evidence of the irreversible investment theory. The analysis implies that efficient policies for natural resources, specifically oil prices, are required to encourage the South Asian economies' role. Further, the positivity of electricity production from renewable gives rise to the growth hypothesis, which depicts that using renewable energy enhances the economic growth of South Asian economies.

This study examined the risk connectedness and its asymmetry between oil, gold, and foreign exchange under the realized volatility, spillover index framework, and high-frequency data during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was found that: (1) At the beginning of the pandemic outbreak, the total volatility spillover in the system declined, which may indicate that the pandemic cuts the trading activities in the financial markets by inhibiting personnel mobility, then, the spillover experienced a short-term sharp rise due to panic. (2) The exchange rate had a significant risk connectedness with gold and international crude oil, but a restrict connectedness with domestic crude oil after the outbreak. These variations of risk transmission caused by the pandemic emerged later than the outbreak, reflecting a certain lag. (3) The impact of the pandemic on the asymmetric risk connectedness between oil, gold and the exchange rate was limited, and the risk transfer resulting from bad news was dominant during the sample period; however, gold was less affected by bad news than the oil and exchange rates. These findings suggested that the establishment of Chinese crude oil futures could restrain volatility spillovers from the exchange rate; the foreign exchange reserve structure should be optimized. Gold has been proved to have a hedging function with the crude oil, and its proportion in foreign exchange reserves should be appropriately increased.

Resources management in the modern era is a crucial perspective of a sustainable environment linked with sustainable development. Therefore, it is crucial to re-estimate the resources-environment management nexus in a new setting. Concerning environmental management from the COP27 perspective, economies are taking various economic, financial, and environmental steps to reduce hazardous emissions in the region. Recently, BRICS economies have invested in renewables and enhanced capital formation to accelerate environmental recovery. In this respect, this study tends to examine the influence of electricity from renewable resources (ELREC), resources management (resources rents), research and development (RDEV) and gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) on carbon emissions of the BRICS economies throughout 1989-2021. Using various diagnostic tests, this study confirms the long-run equilibrium association between the variables. This study uses non-parametric estimation approaches and concludes that ELREC and RDEV significantly enhance environmental sustainability. Except for forest and oil resources, the rest of the forms of the resources increase emissions. On the other hand, economic growth and GFCF significantly lead to higher emissions, which degrades the environment. Resources rents also contribute to increasing carbon emissions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an economic crisis and the ensuing global uncertainty. The current Russian-Ukrainian conflict has escalated tensions in various regions and increased various uncertainties in the financial and economic system. These uncertainties have had a significant impact on the development of the natural gas market during the current critical period of carbon neutrality and energy transition. This paper explores the impact of various uncertainties on price volatility in the U.S. natural gas futures market using the GARCH-MIDAS model. We considered eleven types of uncertainties, including four US economic policy uncertainties, four global uncertainty indicators, and oil supply-demand uncertainty closely related to the natural gas market. The in-sample empirical results find that various uncertainties can impact the natural gas market. However, through out-of-sample testing, we find that economic policy uncertainty has more predictive power than other indicators in predicting natural gas price fluctuations. Interestingly, oil supply-demand uncertainty surpasses global indicators and can provide forecasting information for natural gas markets. Therefore, in the current context of high uncertainty, our research may offer better decision-making opinions for market participants.

Stock market price prediction is considered a critically important issue for designing future investments and consumption plans. Besides, given the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely impacted stock markets worldwide, especially over the past two years, investment decisions have become more challenging for risky. Hence, we propose a two-phase framework for forecasting prices of oil, coal, and natural gas in India, both for pre-and post-COVID-19 scenarios. Notably, the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average, Simple Exponential Smoothing, and K- Nearest Neighbor approaches are utilized for analyses using data from January 2020 to May 2022. Besides, the various outcomes from the analytical exercises are matched with root mean squared error and mean absolute and percentage errors. Overall, the empirical outcomes show that the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average method is appropriate for predicting India's oil, coal, and natural gas prices. Moreover, the predictive precision of oil, coal, and natural gas in the pre-COVID-19 period seems to be better than in that the post-COVID-19 stage. Additionally, prices of these energy resources are forecasted to increase through the year 2025. Finally, in line with the findings, significant policy recommendations are made.

Demand for natural resources is constant, while the prices of natural resources increase day-by-day, which has a significant impact on financial development and economic activity. Thus, the study intends to test the association of natural resource volatility and financial development, in order to recommend policies for economic recovery. The study acquires and analyses data for the N11 economies. The findings reveal that natural resource volatility is linked to global economic growth and governmental governance in pre-pandemic era as well as during pandemic. Results exposed that natural resource volatility has a large detrimental impact on global economic growth and plays a prominent part in economic recovery. The findings are robust and reveal that natural gas, oil, and the quality of public administration all contribute to N11 financial development. The study suggests that policymakers address the challenges raised through the solutions discussed.

This article explores the impact of fuel price movements on the stock market return of 2020 during the COVID-19 disruptions. In doing so, a monthly data of seven selected stock market indices representing developed and emerging economies globally was used for analysis. The study used a time-varying parameter VAR model to examine a time-varying causal association between oil prices and stock market returns and a novel quantile-causality approach to capture the fluctuations of these markets under COVID-19's varying market conditions. The study further utilises the entropy transfer approach to capture the Granger-causal relationship in the presence of nonlinearities of the data series. The results indicate a high information flow from fuel prices to the FTSE-100, Pacific, and European stock indicies, but not the other way round. The results show that, for the FTSE-100 and the European region, there is a two-way information flow between equities and natural gas, and vice-versa. However, a one-way information flow was established from the stock market to the Pacific and emerging economies.

The spreading COVID-19 outbreak has wreaked havoc on the world's financial system that raises an urgent need for the re-evaluation of the gold as safe haven for their money because of the unprecedented challenges faced by markets during this period. Therefore, the current study investigates whether different asset class volatility indices affect desirability of gold as a safe-haven commodity during COVID-19 pandemic. Long run and the short run relationship of gold prices with gold price volatility, oil price volatility, silver price volatility and COVID-19 (measured by the number of deaths due to COVID) has been analyzed in the current study by applying ARDL Bound testing cointegration and non linear ARDL approach on daily time series data ranging from January 2020 to Dec 2021. Findings of the study suggest that in the long run, oil price volatility and gold price volatility positively affect the gold prices, whereas the effect of silver price volatility on gold prices is negative in the long run. However in the short run, all the three indices negatively impact the gold prices. In contrast, the impact of COVID-19 is positive both in the short run and in the long run that proves the validity of gold as safe haven asset in the time of the deadly pandemic. The findings of this study have significant implications and offer investors with some indications to hedge their investments by considering the gold's ability of safe haven during this era of pandemic.

Natural resource price volatility has been a major concern in recent time, especially during the COVID 19 period. Although several empirical research have looked into the oil and natural resources prices nexus with economic growth, but, our study makes a significant contribution to the present literature by estimating the long run natural resource price volatility influence on economic growth as well as the causal associations between volatility of the prices of natural resources and economic growth for BRICS economies over 1995-2020 period. To conduct empirical estimation, the study has used new and advanced (CUP-FM) continuously updated fully modified and continuously updated bias-corrected (CUP-BC) estimators for long term influences of the natural resources prices and (Dumitrescu and Hurlin, 2012) heterogeneous test for panel causality for the estimation of the causal relationship between the variables. The results provide clear evidences about the negative influence of volatility in natural resources prices, whereas positive impact of gas and oil rents on economic growth or economic performance of the BRICS economies. Moreover, bidirectional causal association is also revealed from our empirical findings to exist between economic growth and price volatility of natural resources. The findings of our study are robust to various policy implementations. It is recommended to reduce the reliance of natural resources as well as the adoption of short run and long run natural resource hedging policies to mitigate the detrimental impacts of price volatility of natural resources on economic growth and environment.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has caused the most recent global economic collapse, which severely impacted worldwide economic operations. Natural resource volatility significantly affects global economic recovery. Therefore, the study aims to determine the significance of natural resource volatility, foreign trade, technological innovation, urbanisation, and investment in energy resources on the economic recovery of Chinese provinces. A total of 30 provinces in China were examined between 1995 and 2020. The generalised method of movement (GMM) technique was used to demonstrate that investments in energy sector resources, international commerce, and technological innovation are inconsistent than gross domestic product (GDP) and natural resources. The results demonstrated how trade blocs limit the effect of natural resources on regional economic development in the central provinces. Specifically, 33.4% of energy was saved while 35.2% of emissions were reduced. Although abundant natural resources significantly influence economic growth, studies discovered a negative impact on urbanisation. Nonetheless, the positive effects of trade openness outweighed those of economic recovery. The study proposed stabilising the fluctuating costs of natural resources, encouraging green financing, and increasing investment in energy resources. The findings also provided a novel strategy for achieving high economic growth and recovery.

After the COVID-19 outbreak, this study examines the influence of modifications in China's Sustainable Growth Goals (SDGs) and economic development goals on Chinese enterprises' energy conservation and emissions reduction behavior. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 epidemic has erupted, displacing the flimsy traditional techniques. As a result, the post-COVID-19 pandemic emphasizes the need for a long-term sustainable development method compatible with the local and regional environmental systems. The main objective of this study is used as a roadmap to steer the post-COVID-19 pandemic on a sustainable green path by emphasizing sustainable energy strategies to connect in SDG-related efforts. The investigation in this paper begins with examining significant impacts in the energy industry and their impact on progress toward sustainability. The empirical findings that the CO emissions reduction objectives in long-term development plans had a considerable impact on energy saving and emissions reduction, lowering energy consumption intensity by 3.33% and carbon emission intensity by 4.23% between 2010 and 2019. Besides, the results and long and short run techniques are built to describe the Sustainable Development Goals interface, with the result revealing that Sustainable Development Goals enhance the green economic recovery performance. Furthermore, this study recommends that the key natural resources and green economic recovery policies to overcome the climate change impacts by COVID-19 pandemic.

Bitcoin is a new speculative investment with extremely volatile movement, thus possibly failing to act as a safe haven for crude oil when the price of this energy commodity plummeted following the global outbreak of COVID-19. Meanwhile, Tether is designed to behave similarly to the US dollar with stable fluctuation. In this study, we assessed their safe-haven properties in terms of risk reduction opportunities by proposing an improved version of Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES). Using vine copula-based AR-GJR-GARCH models, we demonstrated that Bitcoin exhibited inconsistent risk reduction capability for oil, particularly before COVID-19. When adding Tether into a portfolio containing oil and Bitcoin, the risk reduction was achieved for any portfolio allocation and was more pronounced amid the COVID-19 period. This suggests that Tether consistently served strong support for Bitcoin to protect oil investors against extreme risk and received a significant impact from the COVID-19 outbreak. However, the consistent safe-haven functionality of Tether was not as good as that of the US dollar in most cases, and this implied the vanishing of its stability. These results were robust when considering another asymmetric volatility model and another dependence model. Furthermore, the proposed improved VaR and ES forecasts outperformed their corresponding unimproved version in quantifying portfolio risk and therefore provided a more accurate assessment of safe-haven roles.

This study examines the dynamic relationship between the gold price and the exchange rate in pre- and during Covid-19 pandemic in India. We consider the periods of about equal length for both the pre- and during Covid-19 by considering the data from January 1, 2019 till February 28, 2021. The descriptive analysis shows a significant increase in the dynamics of gold price and exchange rate after mid-March 2020. The results derived from the ARDL approach show a positive and significant relationship between the gold price and exchange rate both in the long and short run. We have selected the best fitted bivariate copula to study the joint distribution of the gold price and the exchange rate. Using the copula model, we examine the relationship between the gold price and exchange rate in a bivariate framework. We have studied the dependence between them including the tail dependencies using the fitted copula. Our findings reveal that the gold price and exchange rate are significantly correlated for the entire study period, and it also reveals that there is no tail dependence. However, the mutual association between the variables is not confirmed in the considered Covid-19 period.

China's economy is experiencing a rapid revival in the post Covid-19 era, while energy consumption is surging and environmental pressure is prominent. Environmental protection expenditure is an important means for local governments to improve environmental quality; it plays a crucial role in guiding market investment, providing environmental treatment funds and energy conservation and utilization. Based on a sample of 286 prefecture-level cities in China from 2007 to 2017, this study analyzes environmental governance effects of local environmental protection expenditure while considering the time duration, regional differences, and spatial spillover characteristics of industrial pollution emissions. The results reveal that local environmental protection expenditure could help reduce industrial pollution emissions in Chinese cities; however, the governance effects were heterogeneous in different clustering city groups. In addition, the effects of environmental protection expenditure at the neighborhood level varied greatly; the results showed that the stronger the spillover of pollutants, the more significant was the trans-regional governance effect of local environmental protection expenditure. Therefore, local governments should promote a cooperative mode of "joint prevention and control and cross-regional governance" when treating pollutants with strong spillover potential.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the world has faced many challenges, including the 2003 oil price hike, the 2007-08 global financial crisis, among others. While the recent Covid-19 outbreak slowdown economic performance and create uncertainty in natural resources commodity prices, which brought the attention of academic research. Current study examined economic performance and natural resource commodity price volatility in China over the period 1990-2020. Also, this study considers the role of renewable energy investment, renewable electricity output, and green finance in the pre and post Covid-19 pandemic periods. For empirical investigation, this study employed dynamic ordinary least square (DOLS), fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS), and Canonical Cointegrating Regression (CCR). The outcomes reveal that the first-differenced stationary variables are all cointegrated in the long run. While these estimators confirmed that natural resources commodity price volatility negatively affects economic performance. Besides, the results validate the positive impact of renewable energy investment, renewable electricity output, and green finance on economic performance. The results are found robust and consistent, justified by Robust regression. These findings could have essential economic, natural resources, and energy implications for policymakers, governors, and researchers.

The emergence of Covid-19 has created a global panic that affects global economic performance and causes natural resources commodity price volatility. In this regard, the current research study investigated the nexus of natural resource commodity price volatility and global economic performance from January 01, 2019, to July 01, 2021. Using the wavelet power spectrum and wavelet coherence approaches, the empirical findings reveal that only the natural resource commodity prices are vulnerable. However, no vulnerability has been observed for the global economic performance. Additionally, the wavelet coherence reveals that there is no long-run or the short run causal association between these two variables. Moreover, the Breitung-Candelon spectral Granger causality test confirms no causal relationship between natural resource commodity price volatility and global economic performance. Based on the empirical findings, this study provides some relevant policy implications.