## 6 Discussion and Conclusions  
Humanity as a whole is living with an ecological deficit, which is widening in general. Reducing ecological consumption is a basic prerequisite and necessary condition of achieving global ecological sustainability. More and more literature explored the influencing factors of ecological consumption from multiple research perspectives. Based on three panel datasets for the time period 1996-2015, this paper adds to the literature by exploring the impacts of urbanization, renewable energy consumption, service industries, and internet usage on ecological consumption and taking education and income as the control variables. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) this paper employed the EF as the indicator of ecological consumption. The EF tracks ecological consumption in dimensions of both sources and sinks from the consumption side, which enlarges the discussion on ecological sustainability beyond a certain specific domain and is more illuminating for the demand-side policymaking; (2) by selecting representative sample countries covering all of the world, this paper estimated the impacts of the influencing factors on ecological consumption at the global level, which is helpful of summarizing universal laws of reducing ecological consumption; (3) this paper divided all 90 sample countries into 42 developed countries and 48 developing countries and found the different impacts of the influencing factors for the developed countries and the developing countries, especially the different impacts of urbanization and internet usage. Urbanization would reduce ecological consumption in all sample countries and the developed countries. However, urbanization was not an independent and significant influencing factor of ecological consumption in the developing countries. Based on a panel dataset for the time period 1980-2015, [PERSON] and [PERSON] also demonstrated that urbanization had indeterminate and insignificant impacts on carbon emissions in 46 sub-Saharan Africa countries [30]. As discussed in Section 3.1, the negative impacts do not dominate the potential relationships between urbanization and ecological consumption in the developing countries. To further strengthen the negative impacts and weaken the positive impacts of urbanization on ecological consumption, the urban areas should be more ecologically planed (more vertical and compact rather than horizontal and sprawled), and the urban residents ought to have easier and more convenient access to ecologically efficient technologies and public infrastructure such as consumer durables and mass transit. Unplanned, scattered, and disordered urban sprawl in developing countries must be controlled through joint governance at various levels and by different public departments [41]. For all three samples, renewable energy consumption and service industries would reduce ecological consumption. Developing new, reliable, and affordable green and clean technologies to further promote renewable energy consumption and accelerating economic structure transition (less agricultural and industrial industries and more service industries) are useful and effective ways of reducing ecological consumption. By comparing Tables 9 and 10, it could be found that the negative impacts of both renewable energy consumption and service industries in the developed countries were much stronger than those in the developing countries. The much stronger negative impacts could help explain the inversed U-shaped and U-shaped relationships between ecological consumption and income in the developed countries and the developing countries, respectively [10]. Internet usage was an independent and significant force of reducing ecological consumption in the developing countries. Internet not only brings new information, knowledge, technologies, and goods and services markets, but also more ecologically sustainable lifestyles. However, internet usage was not a significant influencing factor of ecological consumption in the developed countries.