<p>The chemical industry is a critical area for energy saving and carbon reduction. Promoting the green transformation of chemical enterprises is not only an inevitable choice to cope with environmental challenges, but also an important path to achieve sustainable development. From the perspective of resilience theory, maintaining robust adaptive and recovery capacities is conducive to ensuring the success of the green transformation. This paper aims to identify the improvement paths for the green transformation level of chemical enterprises based on resilience theory. To achieve this aim, the key influencing factors based on resilience theory are identified based on the Projection Pursuit Model. Subsequently, by adopting dynamic Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), the improvement paths for green transformation are discovered based on the configurations of these key factors. Taking chemical enterprises in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) as a representative case study, this research indicates that the green transformation level of chemical enterprises in the YRD region is low. There are three paths to improve the level of chemical enterprise green transformation based on resilience theory, namely the “government subsidy - scale compensation” path, “government subsidy - resource integration” path and the “learning ability - capital buffer” path. Furthermore, these three mined improvement paths are confirmed to be reliable based on robustness analysis. The study helps improve the efficiency of promoting green transformation in chemical enterprises.</p>