Environmental Sustainability and Sustainable Development: Insights From <scp>FinTech</scp> , Green Finance, and Natural Resource Dynamics in Emerging Economies

ABSTRACT The accelerating pace of environmental degradation and resource depletion poses a major challenge to sustainable development, particularly in BRICS economies. This study examines how natural resource rents (NRR), financial technology (FT), and green finance (GF) affect environmental sustainability (ES) across Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa from 1990 to 2023. To capture both short‐ and long‐run dynamics under cross‐sectional dependence and heterogeneity, the Cross‐Sectionally Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lag (CS‐ARDL) model is employed, with the Augmented Mean Group (AMG) estimator used for robustness. The results show that a 1% increase in NRR raises CO 2 emissions by about 0.21%, whereas FT and green finance reduce emissions by 0.16% and 0.12%, respectively. These findings indicate that FT improves environmental outcomes by promoting digital financial inclusion and capital‐allocation efficiency, while green finance strengthens sustainability through greater renewable‐energy investment. The combined integration of FT and green‐finance mechanisms can therefore accelerate the low‐carbon transition in BRICS economies. Policy actions such as FT‐enabled carbon pricing systems, digital green‐credit programs, and the expansion of green‐bond markets are essential to channel capital toward cleaner sectors and achieve long‐term sustainability targets.