Green development meets safety resilience: Synergistic pathways to sustainability in three urban agglomerations in China

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Enhancing green development and safety resilience is a critical pathway toward sustainable development. Drawing on panel data from the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, and Pearl River Delta urban agglomerations, this study constructs an urban safety resilience indicator system and employs the non-radial directional distance function to measure green development efficiency. By integrating multiple analytical models, including the coupling coordination degree, panel vector autoregression, and Haken models, it quantifies the interaction between green development and safety resilience and explores the mechanisms underlying their synergistic evolution. The findings show that the three regions generally evolved toward moderate or high levels of coordination, with core cities leading this transition. Impulse response analysis reveals that safety resilience exerts a sustained positive effect on green development, whereas green development can impose a short-term constraint on improving safety resilience. The Haken model identifies safety resilience as the order parameter, with a potential barrier of 0.623 6. By 2022, Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen had overcome this barrier and achieved high-order synergy, while the other cities remained in low-order states awaiting phase transition. Based on distances to the potential barrier, the study proposes tailored governance strategies for the advanced, emergent, fragile, and defective synergy categories, and advocates distinct pathways and potential energy transfer mechanisms, such as cross-regional carbon compensation and resilience resource sharing.