Citation: Csalódi, R.; Czvetkó, T.; Sebestyén, V.; Abonyi, J. Sectoral Analysis of Energy Transition Paths and Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Energies 2022, 15, 7920. https://doi.org/10.3390/en15217920 Academic Editor: Rui Peng Received: 25 July 2022 Accepted: 21 October 2022 Published: 25 October 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). energies Article Sectoral Analysis of Energy Transition Paths and Greenhouse Gas Emissions Róbert Csalódi 1,† , Tímea Czvetkó 1,† , Viktor Sebestyén 1,2 and János Abonyi 1, * 1 ELKH-PE Complex Systems Monitoring Research Group, University of Pannonia, Egyetem str. 10, H-8200 Veszprém, Hungary 2 Sustainability Solutions Research Lab, University of Pannonia, Egyetem u. 10, H-8200 Veszprém, Hungary * Correspondence: janos@abonyilab.com † These authors contributed equally to this work. Abstract: The Paris Climate Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals declared by the United Nations set high expectations for the countries of the world to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to be sustainable. In order to judge the effectiveness of strategies, the evolution of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions in countries around the world has been explored based on statistical analysis of time-series data between 1990 and 2018. The empirical distributions of the variables were determined by the Kaplan–Meier method, and improvement-related utility functions have been defined based on the European Green Deal target for 2030 that aims to decrease at least 55% of GHG emissions compared to the 1990 levels. This study aims to analyze the energy transition trends at the country and sectoral levels and underline them with literature-based evidence. The transition trajectories of the countries are studied based on the percentile-based time-series analysis of the emission data. We also study the evolution of the sector-wise distributions of the emissions to assess how the development strategies of the countries contributed to climate change mitigation. Furthermore, the countries’ location on their transition trajectories is determined based on their individual Kuznets curve. Runs and Leybourne–McCabe statistical tests are also evaluated to study how systematic the changes are. Based on the proposed analysis, the main drivers of climate mitigation and evaluation and their effectiveness were identified and characterized, forming the basis for planning sectoral tasks in the coming years. The case study goes through the analysis of two counties, Sweden and Qatar. Sweden reduced their emission per capita almost by 40% since 1990, while Qatar increased their emission by 20%. Moreover, the defined improvement-related variables can highlight the highest increase and decrease in different aspects. The highest increase was reached by Equatorial Guinea, and the most significant decrease was made by Luxembourg. The integration of sustainable development goals, carbon capture, carbon credits and carbon offsets into the databases establishes a better understanding of the sectoral challenges of energy transition and strategy planning, which can be adapted to the proposed method. Keywords: energy transition paths; GHG emissions; sustainable energy; RCP scenarios 1. Introduction Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission is considered the most significant anthropogenic driving force of climate change [1]. In 2020, fossil fuels were taking around 80% of primary energy consumption [2]. Due to this high fossil fuel consumption percentage, the reserve-to- production (R/P) ratio of fossil fuels is significantly decreasing. R/P defines the availability of fossil fuels (such as oil, natural gas, and coal reserves) in years. However, primary energy consumption decreased by 4.5% compared to 2019, from which oil consumption dropped 9.5%, natural gas dropped 3.1%, and coal dropped 4.1%; still, the total world resources in oil last only for 50 years of current production. Regions with the lowest reserves are Europe with 10.4 years and the Asia Pacific with 16.6 years [2]. Energies 2022, 15, 7920. https://doi.org/10.3390/en15217920 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/energies