Green finance in the context of sustainable development sits within the broader discourse of environmental economics and sustainable finance. Their integration has become imperative in addressing global challenges, with the aims of understanding how financial mechanisms can be aligned with sustainability goals, investigating the role of green finance in promoting environmentally friendly investments, and fostering sustainable development. This bibliometric analysis explores the evolution, trends, and challenges in green finance research. It examines 436 articles published between 2016 and 2024, revealing insights into influential publications, authors, journals, institutions, and countries engaged in green finance for sustainability. The study identifies China, the UK, and Pakistan as leaders in research output and citation impact. Furthermore, it highlights the interdisciplinary nature of green finance, reflected in diverse publication outlets spanning environmental, social, and economic domains. The analysis underscores the increasing global interest in green finance, as evidenced by the growing citation rates over time. Key findings include the pivotal role of green finance in energy efficiency, renewable energy development, and the promotion of sustainable economic growth. Overall, this research provides valuable insights for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners, emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and continued research efforts in advancing sustainable finance agendas.

The recent expansion of sustainability studies has reshaped corporate governance and public oversight with direct implications for financial exposure and risk management. In particular, environmental auditing generates decision-useful signals on environmental liabilities, remediation and compliance costs, and budgetary/fiscal risks that affect both corporate financing conditions (e.g., cost of capital) and public finance resilience. This study conducts a comparative examination of environmental auditing practices in Moldova and Bulgaria over 2020–2025, asking how audit mandates, coverage, and disclosure practices inform banks, insurers, investors, and budget holders. Using documents from national legal databases and supervisory portals, we apply descriptive content analysis across structural, substantive, and procedural dimensions, with special attention to financial-risk channels (contingent liabilities, sanction risk, value-for-money and procurement risks). We find that Bulgaria exhibits stronger institutional implementation capacity, while Moldova shows legislative innovation; in both cases, stronger transparency, public participation, and digital audit analytics are needed to quantify fiscal and enterprise-level ESG risks. Overall, this paper positions environmental auditing as a governance lever linking sustainability oversight to finance- and risk-related outcomes, aligning with focus on sustainable finance, ESG disclosure, and governance.

Green finance in the context of sustainable development sits within the broader discourse of environmental economics and sustainable finance. Their integration has become imperative in addressing global challenges, aiming to understand how financial mechanisms can be aligned with sustainability goals, investigating the role of green finance in promoting environmentally friendly investments and fostering sustainable development. This bibliometric analysis explores the evolution, trends, and challenges in green finance research. It examines 436 articles published between 2016 and 2024, revealing insights into influential publications, authors, journals, institutions, and countries engaged in green finance for sustainability. The study identifies China, the UK, and Pakistan as leaders in research output and citation impact. Furthermore, it highlights the interdisciplinary nature of green finance, reflected in diverse publication outlets spanning environmental, social, and economic domains. The analysis underscores the increasing global interest in green finance, as evidenced by the growing citation rates over time. Key findings include the pivotal role of green finance in energy efficiency, renewable energy development, and the promotion of sustainable economic growth. Overall, this research provides valuable insights for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners, emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and continued research efforts in advancing sustainable finance agendas.

This study addresses two distinct questions: (1) to what extent do ESRS-oriented corporate sustainability disclosures operationalize a life cycle perspective; and (2) how can Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) inform a conceptual model for improving the risk relevance of such disclosures? A theory-driven qualitative comparative content analysis is applied to the 2024 sustainability disclosures of Enel, Unilever, and Siemens AG across six analytical dimensions and four integration categories. Across the 18 company–dimension assessments, none met the criteria for systemically integrated disclosure; all were classified as partially integrated. The three cases show broad but uneven value-chain coverage: upstream and environmental information is more developed than downstream, end-of-life, social, and economic integration. Life cycle methods are used selectively, while cross-dimensional links and cradle-to-grave boundary transparency remain limited. Because the evidence concerns three purposively selected cases, the findings are analytical rather than statistically or sectorally generalizable. The study therefore proposes, rather than validates, an LCSA–ESRS Operationalization Model based on boundary reconfiguration, stage-based indicator mapping, dimensional harmonization, and an accounting translation layer. The model indicates how life cycle evidence could be connected to double materiality, systemic sustainability risks, and decision-useful disclosure. The study contributes by distinguishing life cycle-related disclosure from full LCSA integration and by positioning sustainability reporting as a boundary-alignment problem.

The recent expansion of sustainability studies has reshaped the conceptual and practical foundations of corporate governance. The environmental responsibilities of businesses have not only increased but also become more diversified, requiring new approaches to oversight. Consequently, inspection and auditing mechanisms have gained heightened importance, as international regulatory and supervisory authorities emphasize their role in ensuring long-term corporate sustainability. In this context, the restructuring of environmental auditing emerges as a critical instrument for aligning business responsibilities with sustainability goals and corporate governance culture. This study conducts a comparative examination of environmental auditing practices in Moldova and Bulgaria during the period 2020–2025. The research seeks to deter-mine the current status, scope, and trajectory of both practical initiatives and scholarly contributions in this field. Data were collected from national database platforms specific to Moldova and Bulgaria and analyzed through descriptive content analysis with attention to structural, substantive, and procedural dimensions. The findings reveal that, while Bulgaria demonstrates a higher degree of institutional implementation capacity and Moldova exhibits notable legislative innovation, both countries face pressing needs in enhancing transparency, public participation, and the allocation of targeted resources for rural infrastructure through digital auditing mechanisms.

Green bonds are intended to mobilise capital for environmental investment, yet evidence on their contribution to economy-wide circularity remains limited. This study examines whether national green-bond market development is associated with the circular material use rate and resource productivity in the EU-27. A balanced country-year panel covering 2014-2024 (297 observations) is analysed with country and year fixed effects, six controls, contemporaneous and one- and two-year-lagged green-bond shares, country-clustered standard errors, restricted wild cluster bootstrap-t inference with 9,999 repetitions, and Driscoll-Kraay sensitivity estimates. The complete-control samples contain 270, 243, and 216 observations for the current, L1, and L2 specifications. None of the six baseline models, 20 main robustness-model estimates, or 54 leave-one-country-out re-estimations yields a wild-bootstrap p-value below 0.10. Circular material use coefficients are consistently negative but imprecise, while resource-productivity coefficients change sign across timing and control choices. The findings do not support the two directional hypotheses and indicate no statistically robust conditional association over the observed period. Green-bond market size should therefore not be treated as sufficient evidence of circular-economy progress; allocation, additionality, and verifiable material outcomes remain decisive.