Purpose As the world comes to terms with climate change as an accepted scientific reality and focuses on mitigation, the major challenge emerges in the financing of climate change mitigation or green sustainable finance. This study aims to systematically map, decode and interpret the evolving landscape of green finance research by identifying core themes, emerging trends and theoretical underpinnings. Design/methodology/approach To address this objective, the study adopts a systems thinking approach. We use multiple analytical methods, such as traditional bibliometric analysis and more advanced text mining techniques, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), BERTopic modelling, association rule mining and knowledge graph construction. Findings The analysis identifies six major thematic clusters in the green finance literature: (1) Sustainable Finance & Environment, (2) Energy & Sustainable Economic Growth, (3) Green Enterprises, (4) Green Finance & Investment, (5) Green Banking & Financial Institutions and (6) Green Market Dynamics & Risk Management. The study highlights green finance’s growing complexity and interdisciplinarity, including regulatory innovation, ESG integration, climate risk transmission, cross-market spillovers, blue finance, localized financial models and digital technologies. Originality/value This study offers a novel scholarly contribution by combining bibliometrics with natural language processing and network-based methods to uncover both latent structures and semantic relationships in green finance research. The research improves methodological sophistication and establishes the groundwork for future studies to employ sophisticated, computational methods in theory development and literary analysis. The results highlight the importance of establishing lucid, inclusive and adaptable financial instruments that promote long-term sustainability within the financial system.
Ray et al. (Mon,) studied this question.