The Impact of China’s Climate-Adaptive City Pilot Policy on Urban Ecological Resilience

Against the backdrop of global climate change, enhancing urban adaptive capacity to climate shocks has become a critical issue for sustainable urban development. Based on this, this study treats the Climate-Adaptive City Pilot (CACP) policy in China as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a difference-in-differences (DID) approach to empirically evaluate its impact on urban ecological resilience, using panel data from Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2010 to 2023. Heterogeneity and mechanism analyses are further conducted to explore differential policy effects and underlying transmission channels. The results indicate that the Climate-Adaptive City Pilot policy significantly enhances urban ecological resilience, and this finding remains robust after a series of robustness checks, including winsorized regressions, propensity score matching, time placebo tests, and individual placebo tests. Further analysis reveals that the policy effects are more pronounced in cities with lower or higher levels of human capital development, as well as in cities with low to medium water resource endowments. Mechanism analysis suggests that resilient infrastructure investment and green technological innovation constitute the key pathways through which the pilot policy improves urban ecological resilience. From the perspective of urban ecological resilience, this study provides empirical evidence on the effectiveness of climate-adaptive city pilot policies and offers important policy implications for deepening the implementation of climate-adaptive city initiatives, designing context-sensitive adaptation strategies, and improving urban climate adaptation governance mechanisms.