Can climate-adaptive urban development enhance ecological environmental resilience? Evidence from China

Enhancing urban ecological environmental resilience (EER) has become a primary focus in sustainable development due to the growing impacts of climate change and the mounting pressure on ecosystems. An important policy pathway for enhancing EER is climate-adaptive urban development (CAUD), which aims to improve cities’ capacity to manage climate-related risks. Using panel data on 283 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2012 to 2022, this study employs a double-machine-learning (DML) framework to conduct causal inference. The findings demonstrate that: (1) CAUD considerably improves urban EER, and this finding is consistent across several robustness tests. (2) The positive effect operates mainly through two channels: the agglomeration of ecological and environmental governance-related talent, and the development of ecological and environmental governance-related industries. (3) The resilience-enhancing effect is more noticeable in southern regions, central cities, and resource-based cities. (4) While CAUD generates positive effects locally, it also exerts a significant “siphoning effect” on neighboring cities, with spatial externalities exhibiting clear distance-decay characteristics. These findings provide causal evidence on the ecological governance effects of CAUD. They also offer empirical insights from China for building a more adaptive and equitable global urban ecological governance system.