**1. Introduction**

Sustainable development and green growth are ideas for which there has been a renewed increase in interest among politicians, scientists, and the public in recent years. The growing interest in these concepts seems to be directly proportional to the increasingly frequent and more dramatic scientific reports on the progressive degradation and increasing human pressure on the environment. However, treating these concepts as a kind of a "remedy" for the current and future problems of the world is more and more often described as unjustified. Merely investing in increasingly efficient technologies supported by motivating the business sphere so that national economies can grow further and at the same time reduce their unsustainable environmental impact seems insufficient, according to recent studies. It is worth mentioning here, for example, a project of a team led by Monika Dittrich [1], which published its first findings in 2012. It showed that with the economic growth rate of about 2–3% per year, the consumption of, e.g., fish, livestock, the use of forests, metals, and fossil fuels would increase from 70 billion tonnes per year in 2012 to 180 billion tons in 2050.

In contrast, the value that would allow a balance between economic growth and the use of the environment was set at around 50 billion tonnes. As indicated in the report, the value was already exceeded by a civilization in 2000. The Dittrich team also looked at what would happen if each country immediately implemented best practices for the efficient use of natural resources. Consumption would then improve, but it would still be as much as 43 billion tons above the accepted equilibrium level.

Does this mean that we should abandon attempts to implement the assumptions of the concepts for which the overarching goal is to search for the possibility of permanent decoupling of the GDP from the total consumption of the Earth's natural resources? The

**Citation:** Cheba, K.; B ˛ak, I.

Environmental Production Efficiency in the European Union Countries as a Tool for the Implementation of Goal 7 of the 2030 Agenda. *Energies* **2021**, *14*, 4593. https://doi.org/10.3390/ en14154593

Academic Editors: Bartlomiej Iglinski and Marco Torresi

Received: 20 April 2021 Accepted: 26 July 2021 Published: 29 July 2021

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answer is obvious—no, we should still search for opportunities to implement the assumptions of these concepts effectively. Unfortunately, however, we cannot predict both further obstacles to their implementation and the possibility of evolution of today's technological solutions. Especially that some of these solutions already encounter problems that were difficult to predict earlier.

For example, it is worth mentioning that Norway achieved a record level of electric car sales last year. In 2020, as much as 54% of the cars delivered to this market did not have a combustion engine in any form. However, due to the high repair cost and subsidies, which lower the price of electric cars, otherwise twice as expensive as combustion models, their repair is not profitable. As a result, the number of scrap electric cars is growing exponentially, and at least one in three of them could be repaired. In addition, although the material from scrapped cars is, according to the manufacturers' information, 98% recoverable, only a small percentage of repairs in Norway are made with the use of used car parts [2].

These reports are contradicted by official statistics used to monitor progress in implementing the concept of sustainable development, which show that Scandinavian countries are, in fact, the only countries in Europe that have managed to separate economic growth from negative environmental pressures permanently. What does this mean? Only that the adopted indicators are too general or too unified. Striving to develop similar evaluation standards for all countries, e.g., for the European Union, one forgets about the differences between those countries, which are significant despite relatively similar development conditions.

Hence, there is a need for more detailed analyses and new tools to support the monitoring of progress in implementing the sustainable development strategy, such as green growth. It should be emphasized that this level of detail should not be limited only to creating increasingly advanced indicators. The relationships between individual areas of these concepts are also meaningful, as they will allow for a better understanding of each of them.

The symptoms of similar thinking are visible both in the current and previous concepts of measuring progress in implementing the Sustainable Development Strategy. The strategy, in force until 2018, assumed, for example, various levels of its implementation: from the level of explanatory indicators, through operational indicators, to headline indicators. The main problem of this hierarchical method of presenting indicators was the lack of connections between the successive levels of the pyramid (until 2018, the sustainable development indicators were hierarchical and presented in the form of a pyramid). As it was shown in [3], achieving the level of indicators close to the assumed values at the lower levels of the pyramid did not translate into equally high positions at higher levels. On the other hand, in the current strategy aiming to achieve as many as 17 different goals, it was decided to immediately identify the goals and appropriate indicators that should be related to each other. Moreover, in this case, some of these assumed relationships are not observed in reality, which was confirmed, among others, by the results of the research presented in [4,5], examining in detail the relationship between the various goals of the strategy.

These observations prompted the authors to begin research analyzing the strength and directions of the relationship between the indicators used to measure the latest Sustainable Development Strategy, the 2030 Agenda, and the indicators used to measure the concept of green growth, which is referred to in the literature [6,7] as a tool for sustainable development.

Therefore, the study aims to present a proposal for measuring the relationship between the concepts of sustainable development and green growth. The considerations presented in the paper focus primarily on the relationships between Goal 7 of the 2030 Agenda (SDG 7), i.e., to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all and one of the areas considered in the Green Growth Strategy (GGS), i.e., environmental production efficiency. Both of these areas illustrate the relationship between the natural environment and the economy, emphasizing the transformations taking place in energy use. Selected taxonomic methods were used to study the relationships between these areas: TOPSIS [8] and multicriteria taxonomy [9].

The paper, therefore, formulates the following research questions:


The added value of the study is the research approach used by the authors, in which the values of synthetic measures obtained for both analyzed areas became the basis for grouping the EU countries characterized by similarity and dissimilarity of development. This approach was used for the first time in this study. As a rule, studies of this kind are limited to building rankings of objects in terms of the adopted indicators. The literature on the subject lacks analyses showing the relationship between sustainable development and green growth, which is assumed to be a tool for implementing the sustainable development policy. The research approach used in the paper allows for assessing these relationships from various perspectives, including the similarity and dissimilarity of development. The authors of the article identified a research gap in the literature in this area. There are no studies that show not only the level of development in these two areas but also the way they are related to each other. This approach is demonstrated in this paper.

The layout of this article includes an introduction (Section 1), which presents the main purpose of the work and explains the most important motivations of the authors for researching the relationship between the natural environment and the economy, with particular emphasis on transformations taking place in the field of energy use. Later in the paper, research on the green economy as a sustainable development tool is reviewed (Section 2). Then, the statistical data used in the study are presented, and the research procedure used in the study is described (Section 3). The article ends with presenting the research results (Section 4), discussion, and conclusions resulting from the research (Section 5).

### **2. Green Growth as a Tool for Sustainable Development-Research Overview**

It is assumed that the discussion on the concept of development, taking into account economic and social, and environmental aspects, began in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s [10], although already in the 1960s, the first publications appeared in the literature [11], drawing attention to the negative effects of modern large-scale technologies on the natural environment. Initially, it was rather a political idea aimed mainly at improving the functioning of the economy in terms of its balance with the natural environment, only in subsequent years taking into account also social goals [12]. Since then, this concept has undergone a significant evolution, which was initially aimed at finding the concept's proper definition. As B. Caroll (2002) demonstrated in her work, who analyzed as many as 500 different definitions of sustainable development, most of these proposals did not contribute much to the most frequently cited definition of the Gro Bruntland report [13]. According to this definition, sustainable development is: "development that meets current needs without depriving future generations of the ability to meet their own needs".

Nowadays, more and more often, certain elements (distinctions) are indicated, which are important for a proper understanding of this concept [14]. These are primarily such terms as:


Each of these terms allows for a better understanding of the concept of sustainable development. Their bottom line is to understand this concept as a constantly evaluating process, which means that there is a need for a dynamic approach to this issue. Integration is also essential, understood as a kind of relationality, which means that the three main components of sustainable development form different relationships with each other. In addition, these relationships are formed between them and the environment. Hence the numerous attempts to integrate sustainable development into other areas [25–31]. As a result, there is a growing number of new research areas such as sustainable competitiveness, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable energy. Each of these areas can be treated separately or as a development of particular dimensions of the SD—e.g., sustainable competitiveness or sustainable energy as a development of the economic dimension. The sustainability of the balance between these dimensions, which is now identified as the most important sustainable development goal, is also worth mentioning.

There was also a need to develop concepts that will result in a more accurate picture of what is happening in the economic dimension, which is in a strong relationship with the other dimensions; social and natural. Previous studies by the authors [32,33] show that along with economic development, there is a similar rate of social development, which applies in principle to all European Union countries. On the other hand, in the case of relations between economic and natural measurements, two types of relationships can be distinguished: a positive relationship that means that economic growth also entails an improvement in the environmental dimension and the opposite situation when economic growth comes at the expense of the environment. Therefore, more advanced analyses are needed to show what model or models of development we are currently dealing with in the European Union see: [34,35].

The response to such needs is the so-called concepts supporting research on sustainable development, such as the concept of green growth. This concept was first promoted in 2005 by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia-Pacific (UNESCAP), mainly to seek opportunities to introduce a new low-carbon sustainable development model for rapidly developing Asian countries [36]. The term, as in the case of sustainable development, is defined in many different ways. According to the OECD [37] definition, green growth means "fostering economic growth and development while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which our well-being relies." UNESCAP [38,39] defines this term as: "...growth that emphasizes environmentally sustainable economic progress to foster low-carbon, socially inclusive development." According to World Bank [40], green growth should be described as: "growth that is efficient in its use of natural resources, clean in that it minimizes pollution and environmental impacts, and resilient in that it accounts for natural hazards and the role of environmental managemen<sup>t</sup> and natural capital in preventing physical disasters." The literature [41,42] also indicates that the concept of green growth does not replace sustainable development but achieving the purposes of sustainable development becomes possible when the economy is functioning right. An essential aspect of this operation is the care of proper efficient, at least diverse, and efficient use of energy sources.

Energy, access, and use are the theme of Goal 7 of the 2030 Agenda: ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all. As indicated in the explanation to this goal [43]: "Access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy is crucial to achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals—from poverty eradication via advancements in health, education, water supply and industrialization to mitigating climate change."

In the case of green growth, the indicators describing energy use were assigned by the OECD to the economy's environmental and resource productivity, together with indicators describing carbon productivity, non-energy material productivity, and environmentally adjusted multifactor productivity. As indicated in the latest OECD report [44,45], "the structure of the country's energy supply and the efficiency of its energy use are key determinants of environmental performance and economic development." This report indicates, for example:


The results of the research presented in this paper, on the one hand, allow verifying whether these observed trends are still valid. Thanks to the application of selected multivariate methods of statistical analysis, it is also possible to examine the relationship between the degree of achievement of Goal 7 of sustainable development and the results of energy use within the green growth concept. The following part of the paper will examine the relationship between these areas.

An overview of current research directions in the field of green economy and sustainable development can also be found in the works published by other authors. Table 1 contains an overview of selected studies in this field, presenting the main directions of research and analysis in this domain.


**Table 1.** Research directions in the field of green growth as a tool for sustainable development.
