How can climate adaptation policy enhance urban climate resilience? Empirical evidence from China

PLOS One | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0335736 November 6, 2025 13 / 21 the estimate of the actual policy effect, 0.0118). Therefore, the test indicates that this study’s results are robust and not affected by other unobservable factors. 4.3. CACCP policy mechanisms test 4.3.1. Mechanisms test results. We further examined the policy’s mechanism for promoting urban climate resilience. Firstly, we tested the GB mediating variable based on the mediating mechanism model constructed in this paper. The test results are shown in Table 5. It is found that both the stepwise regression method and the Sobel test indicate that green bonds played a significant positive conduction role in the implementation of the CACCP policy. This study confirms the validity of research hypothesis H2, emphasizing the important role of financial instruments in climate adaptation [67,69, 70]. It also provides insights into the mechanisms behind EU financial integration [69] and private sector incentives [70]. At the same time, we drew the conduction process and effect decomposition diagram of this mediating mechanism (Fig 6), which shows that although the conduction effect of green bonds is relatively small at present (a × b = 0.0008), it warns the Chinese government that it should strengthen the conduction role of the financial market for climate investment in the planning and action of climate adaptation policies. Table 4. Results of the instrumental variable test. Variable treated Resilience treated 0.0789* (0.0449) Constant 0.2382** (0.0946) 0.0508*** (0.0135) Controls YES YES

City FE YES YES Year FE YES YES N 741 741 First-stage F-statistic 10.09*** Hausman 26.15** Notes: Standard errors in parentheses; *** p < 0.01, ** p < 0.05, * p < 0.1; Same as below. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0335736.t004 Fig 5. Mixed placebo test. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0335736.g005