How do natural resources, urbanization, and institutional quality meet with ecological footprints in the presence of income inequality and human capital in the next eleven countries?

The rapid pace of financial and societal progress has generated a multitude of environmental challenges. In light of this perspective, this work endeavours to analyze the effect of income inequality (GINI), natural resources (NAT), human development (HC), and quality of institutions (IQ) on EF in N-11 countries from 1990 to 2018. The cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lags (CS-ARDL) method is employed to explore the long-term and short-term relationships, which effectively address panel data problems such as slope homogeneity and cross-sectional dependence. The empirical findings indicate that improvements in NAT, HC, URB, and IQ have a positive effect on the environment. Income inequality exacerbates social disparities, thereby exerting a detrimental impact on the ecosystem. Based on these results, the study recommends allocating more financial resources to human development and promoting institutional quality to mitigate the ecological footprint. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of sustainable utilization of natural resources to ensure their longterm availability and minimize ecological impact. Simultaneously, addressing income inequality is crucial in effectively managing environmental challenges and fostering long-term ecological sustainability.