Managing climate risks through adaptation policy: Evidence from China’s climate-adaptive city pilots

Managing climate risks has become a central challenge for rapidly urbanizing economies, yet empirical evidence on the effectiveness of large-scale adaptation policies remains limited. China’s Climate-Adaptive City Pilot Policy (CACP) is evaluated as a nationwide policy intervention to examine how adaptation-oriented governance influences urban climate risk management capacity. Drawing on panel data spanning 2010 through 2022 for 267 Chinese cities, we constructed an entropy-weighted urban ecological resilience (UER) index that proxies the extent to which cities can buffer, adjust to, and rebound from climate-induced risks, and we deployed a difference-in-differences design to gauge policy effectiveness. The empirical results indicate that rolling out the pilot scheme produces a meaningful uplift in cities’ capacity to govern urban climate risk. The effects display substantial heterogeneity across cities, reflecting differences in economic structures, geographic conditions, and governance capacities. Mechanism analyses indicate that the observed improvements may operate through multiple, interconnected pathways, including economic restructuring, energy transition, strengthened environmental governance, and the enhancement of ecological asset values. These pathways jointly reduce exposure to climate-related environmental risks while improving adaptive and recovery capacities. Overall, the findings suggest that climate adaptation policies can function as effective risk governance instruments that generate resilience-enhancing co-benefits. This study provides policy-relevant evidence on how adaptation-oriented urban governance can support climate risk management in rapidly urbanizing contexts.