Do Green Finance, Green Insurance, and Renewable Energy Really Matter for Sustainability?

The accelerating global commitment to addressing climate change underscores the pivotal role of green finance, green insurance, and renewable energy in promoting environmental sustainability. This study investigates how these instruments influence carbon emissions in Saudi Arabia, based on a balanced panel of listed insurance firms covering the period 2010–2022. Using advanced econometric estimators, Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares, Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares, and the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model, the results reveal that green finance and renewable energy significantly contribute to the reduction of carbon emissions, confirming their vital role in the transition toward a low-carbon economy. In contrast, green insurance shows an insignificant relationship with environmental outcomes, reflecting its early stage of development and the absence of a robust regulatory framework linking insurance practices to environmental performance. The study makes a novel contribution by jointly examining green finance, green insurance, and renewable energy as interconnected drivers of sustainability, an approach rarely explored in emerging, oil-dependent economies. By providing firm-level evidence from Saudi Arabia, it extends the environmental finance literature and demonstrates how financial innovation and renewable energy adoption can jointly foster decarbonization. From a policy perspective, the findings highlight the need to strengthen regulatory frameworks for green insurance, enhance financial mechanisms that channel capital toward environmentally responsible projects, and expand renewable energy investment. These actions are essential for advancing the objectives of Saudi Vision 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals related to clean energy and climate action, positioning the financial and insurance sectors as key enablers of the Kingdom's low-carbon transition.