<p>Since the adoption of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Emerging 7 (E7) countries (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Türkiye) are dealing with various challenges in delivering a more sustainable future, with environmental deterioration being one of the paramount concerns. To address this issue and contribute to the debate on the human capital-environmental deterioration nexus, the on-hand study utilizes annual panel data of E7 countries over the time span 1992–2018. In doing so, we adopt the method of moments quantile regression (QRGR) with fixed effects and the ordinary least squares regression with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors (DLKY) to explore the environmental impacts of energy resources, globalization, biocapacity, human capital, and open trading. Our results verify the inverted U-shaped nexus between economic boom and environmental deterioration indicating that open trading and energy resources uphold the environmental deterioration of E7 countries. Furthermore, our results reveal that human capital is efficient in mitigating environmental deterioration across all quantiles. In addition, biocapacity works to alleviate the environmental deterioration for better environmental quality of E7 countries. Similarly, globalization is playing an important role in strengthening environmental quality across all quantile levels. Lastly, in addition to the direct impact, this study supposed that open trading could indirectly affect environmental deterioration through the channel of human capital. Our findings further accentuate the need to improve the ecological base that is a major strategy to guarantee the achievement of SDG 15 among other SDGs for the sustainable well-being of emerging countries.</p>