As sustainable development strategies keep advancing and the external environment remains unstable, green innovation resilience has become a critical capability for enterprises to cope with uncertainty and achieve low-carbon transformation. This study uses panel data of China’s A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2023 to explore how executive environmental attention drives firms’ green innovation resilience. Based on the attention-based view, this study explores the direct effect of executive environmental attention and the moderating role of environmental regulation and corporate social responsibility. The results show that executive environmental attention is significantly positively correlated with green innovation resilience. In addition, environmental regulation and corporate social responsibility both strengthen the positive effects of executives’ environmental attention and green innovation resilience, and this impact is mainly reflected in high-tech industries. Heterogeneity analysis further shows that the promoting effect of executives’ environmental attention on green innovation resilience is more significant in large-scale, high industry competition and manufacturing enterprises. By adopting a micro-level perspective, this study deepens our understanding of the cognitive basis for firms’ green sustainable development in an uncertain environment. It also provides theoretical evidence and practical implications for enterprises to enhance green innovation resilience by strengthening executive environmental cognition and improving internal and external governance mechanisms.