Singapore has been ranked in the most dynamic financial market and the highest ecological deficit country, indicating that the trade-off hypothesis may exist. The main goal of the present study is to probe the impact of financial development, economic growth, and human capital on ecological footprint in Singapore from 1980 to 2016. The outcomes obtained from the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method have failed to provide a clear impact of financial sector development on ecological footprint. However, the Bayesian analysis reveals that both financial development and economic growth have a harmful influence on EF, while the impact of human capital is beneficial. A theoretical conclusion derived is that monetary expansion policies should be associated with improving human capital to achieve the United Nations SDGs in the context of Singapore. The findings of the study are of particular interest to policymakers for developing sound policy decisions for sustainable economic progress which is not at the cost of environment. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.