Global climate crisis and environmental degradation have been on the spotlight of sustainable development discussions, recently. Especially after COVID-19 pandemic, it has become critical to analyse the factors affecting environmental degradation. At this point, empirical analyses provide objective and substantial evidences for policymakers. In this context, this study tries to shed light on the nexus between eco-innovations and ecological footprint, which is a less discussed area in the literature, yet. In this study, empirical investigations are conducted for 37 OECD countries and 2000–2020 period. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study analysing the aforementioned relationship for this data set with a combined modelling with economic growth and renewable energy. Hence, it is expected to make a contribution to the related literature on this axis. Empirical findings indicate that there is a negative relationship between ecological footprint and eco-innovations in OECD countries. Also, economic growth rate seems in inverted U-shaped relationship between ecological footprint. Moreover, renewable energy consumption is in a negative relationship with the dependent variable and what is more is that ecological footprint exhibits path dependency. All these findings together imply substantial proposals for policymakers.