The field of sustainable finance has grown rapidly in response to escalating climate and economic challenges, yet its intellectual landscape, especially the connectedness between green and traditional financial systems, remains underexplored. This paper aims to systematically map the evolution, thematic structure, and intellectual linkages of the sustainable finance literature with a specific focus on risk spillovers and connectedness across financial systems. This study employs a comprehensive bibliometric methodology to map 1261 Web of Science-indexed articles (1994–2024) on the connectedness of sustainable finance, using techniques such as citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, co-citation analysis, trend cartography, collaboration network, and keyword trend analysis. The study clarifies the field’s evolution and identifies its key themes, influential authors, institutions, and networks. The findings reveal an exponential surge in sustainable finance research after 2015, coinciding with policy milestones like the Paris Agreement and rising ESG investment interest. Notably, the review uncovers how research clusters have formed around topics such as green bond market spillovers, green technology innovation, and climate risk, highlighting both well-established areas and emerging fronts. The contribution lies in providing a roadmap for future research and policy: the study pinpoints knowledge gaps (e.g., systemic risk transmission between green and conventional assets) and suggests how policymakers and investors can leverage these insights to foster a resilient, sustainable financial system.

The rapid integration of FinTech and sustainability-oriented sectors is reshaping financial risk dynamics, particularly in emerging markets such as China. This study investigates tail-dependent spillovers among ten Chinese FinTech and sustainability-linked sectors from 2015–2024 using a factor-purged Quantile Vector Autoregression (QVAR) with generalized forecast error variance decompositions. By isolating idiosyncratic shocks, the framework uncovers how risk creation, transmission, and absorption vary across market states. Results show that (i) FinTech acts as a net transmitter of shocks in adverse (lower-tail) states, amplifying downside risk to clean energy and green innovations; (ii) policy-intensive sectors (environmental and atmospheric governance) switch roles across quantiles, revealing asymmetric regulatory spillovers; and (iii) diversification benefits compress in the tails, with cross-sector linkages intensifying during crises. These findings highlight the importance of quantile-specific stress testing for regulators and the design of state-contingent hedging strategies for portfolio managers.

Comprehending the dynamics of risk spillover across the value chain is indispensable for effective risk management, especially amid increasing economic and geopolitical uncertainty. This study investigates the mechanics of risk transmission within the value chain of Chinese hospitality industry, employs a (TVP-VAR) model, using daily data from January 2015 to December 2023. The research identifies key sub-sectors, hotel resort and luxury cruise, film and entertainment, mall and supermarket, environmental and facilities services, air freight and logistics, and road transportation, as significant risk transmitters that affect the overall stability of the industry. Conversely, sectors such as restaurant, liquor and wine, leisure services and railway transport are designated as risk receivers. The results offer critical insights for stakeholders, emphasizing the necessity of comprehensive risk management strategies to reduce negative spillover effects, particularly in the context of economic shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical events like the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

This study maps the structural architecture of return-shock transmission in global sustainable finance, asking whether China's environmental-governance sectors originate the volatility that propagates to green innovation and global clean-energy benchmarks, and whether climate policy uncertainty drives or absorbs market dynamics. Using the TVP-VAR connectedness framework of Antonakakis et al. (2020) with the Diebold–Yilmaz generalized spillover index, we analyze a nine-node system of daily data from 5 January 2015 to 31 July 2024 comprising six Chinese environmental-governance sub-sectors, a Chinese green-innovation index, the S&P Global Clean Energy Index and the Chinese Climate Policy Uncertainty (CCPU) index. The network exhibits a hierarchical architecture with a total connectedness index of 64.97%. The core governance sectors—comprehensive governance (NET = +22.16), water treatment (+12.17) and solid-waste treatment (+7.17)—are the dominant net transmitters, with comprehensive governance transmitting to all eight remaining nodes, while the global clean-energy benchmark (-17.21) and the green-innovation index (-16.08) are the principal net receivers; the green-innovation index nevertheless relays net volatility onward to the global benchmark, evidencing an innovation-to-market channel. Transmission intensifies sharply around China's 2060 carbon-neutrality pledge and the COVID-19 shock. In contrast to the prevailing convention of treating climate policy uncertainty as an exogenous driver, we embed the uncertainty index as a network node and show it is a universal net receiver, implying that measured policy uncertainty absorbs, rather than originates, the volatility of the sectors it summarizes. The findings position Chinese governance sectors as systemically important transition nodes for regulators, investors and policymakers.