Under the background of the global “polycrisis”, enhancing ecological resilience has become a key pathway for achieving sustainable urban development, particularly in ecologically fragile regions. This study takes the Loess Plateau as the study area and constructs an evaluation framework for urban ecological resilience based on three dimensions: resistance, adaptability, and recovery. By integrating multi-source data from 1990 to 2020, the spatiotemporal evolution of urban ecological resilience in the region is analyzed, and the Geodetector is employed to identify the impacts of natural, economic, and social factors on urban ecological resilience. The main findings are as follows: (1) The urban ecological resilience index on the Loess Plateau shows an overall trend of initial increase followed by decline. Cities in both the western and eastern parts exhibit similar evolutionary patterns, while cities in the central region demonstrate a continuous upward trend, with the resilience index increasing from 0.3658 in 1990 to 0.3838 in 2020. (2) Urban ecological resilience in the study area exhibits a spatial gradient pattern characterized by a decrease from core cities toward peripheral areas. Resilience levels gradually weaken outward from urban centers. The spatial agglomeration effect is relatively weak, with most regions showing insignificant clustering and lacking contiguous high-resilience clusters. (3) Urban ecological resilience on the Loess Plateau is jointly influenced by multiple factors, with the effects of key drivers displaying clear stage-specific characteristics. Socioeconomic factors—particularly population density, per capita GDP, and industrial structure—serve as the primary driving forces, while natural conditions provide basic constraints. Interactions among factors are dominated by bivariate interactions and nonlinear synergistic effects. These findings deepen the understanding of the evolution and driving mechanisms of urban ecological resilience in ecologically fragile regions and provide scientific support for enhancing urban resilience and promoting sustainable development in the Loess Plateau.
Wang et al. (2026) studied this question.