Drivers of ecological environment resilience in China’s coastal areas

Scientifically measuring the ecological environment resilience and identifying its drivers is essential for advancing ecological protection and governance. This paper employs the Resistance-Adaptability-Recovery-Transformation (RART) framework to construct an index system of ecological environment resilience. The Entropy Weight–Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is applied to analyze the spatiotemporal evolution of ecological environment resilience in China’s coastal areas. TWFE (Two-Way Fixed Effect) and Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression (GTWR) methods are used to investigate the drivers of ecological environment resilience. The findings reveal that: (1) Ecological environment resilience in China’s coastal areas has shown an overall upward trend, though regional development remains unbalanced. Resilience in southern coastal areas is generally higher than in the north. (2) PA and II exhibit significant negative effects in the two-way fixed-effects model, while OU exhibits a marginally significant negative effect at the 10% level. ED, IS, and SEI are not statistically significant in the two-way fixed-effects model. (3) ED and IS show opposite directional trends between the southern and northern coastal regions of China, while the differences in the other four driving factors (PA, OU, II, SEI) are reflected in their magnitudes. These insights offer valuable policy implications for strengthening ecological environment resilience and guiding sustainable development in coastal regions worldwide.