The need for environmental awareness and green management in business and management arenas has led to green becoming a vast field that needs to be parcelled out to identify the green shoots. Knowledge is emerging as the key factor in developing a green awareness in companies, which has come to be called green intellectual capital (GIC). The objective of this research is therefore twofold. First, to identify and map the existence of active research fronts in the field of green through a bibliometric analysis (bringing green shoots to the surface); and second, to analyse in depth the GIC research front previously identified in this paper (one of the green shoots that emerged) and to offer new insights into it. We analysed 4,180 articles (4,142 for the identification of green research fronts and 38 for GIC) from WoS published between 2008 and 2022. Amongst the potential contributions made by this study include characterising 19 of the most active research fronts on green in business and management, as well as to know what advances have been made (and what remains to be done) in the literature on GIC.