<p>This paper investigates the asymmetric impact of exchange rate fluctuations, financial development, and renewable energy consumption on green economic growth in Pakistan over the period 1980–2022, utilizing the Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag model. The empirical findings indicate that positive financial development and renewable energy shocks are a big boost to green economic growth. Likewise, an appreciation of exchange rates is harmful to green growth, whereas a depreciation is beneficial to the performance of a green economy by facilitating export competitiveness and environmentally sustainable production. The results verify that all these relationships are asymmetric, implying that positive and negative movements in the macroeconomic variables produce varying effects in the growth of the green economy. Based on these findings, the study recommends enhancing financial regimes to facilitate green investments, increasing the use of renewable energy by incentives and regulatory systems, and stabilizing exchange rate processes to facilitate the use of renewable energy by sustainable industries. These policy interventions can assist Pakistan as well as other developing economies to realize sustainable economic growth in the long run, besides minimizing environmental degradation.</p><p><i>Clinical Trial Registration</i> Not applicable.</p> Graphical abstract <p></p>