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 14 / 21 Secondly, according to this paper’s moderating mechanism test model, we examined the moderating effects of edu- cation (Edu), public environmental concern (Pec), and mineral resource dependence (Mrd ) on the CACCP policy. The results are shown in Table 6 and Fig 7. We can see that the estimates of the coefficient β1 we are interested in are 0.0269, 0.0183, and −0.0757, respectively, and all are statistically significant. The findings indicate that the higher the level of urban education and public environmental concern, the more conducive it is to promoting the CACCP policy and enhanc- ing its effectiveness. Consequently, research hypotheses H3 and H4 are validated. The findings also indicate that min- eral resource dependence exerted a significant adverse moderating effect. In other words, the lower the urban mineral resource dependence, the higher the performance of the CACCP policy will be. Consequently, research hypothesis H5 is validated. We also found that, based on the use of uniformly standardized data treatment, the absolute magnitude of the moderating effect can be compared: Mrd > Edu > Pec. This study’s findings reveal the moderating role of urban human capital, cultural values, and economic structural characteristics in climate adaptation policies, and also provide quantita- tive evidence to complement research on equitable resilience [71] and racial vulnerability [72]. Table 5. Results of the mediating mechanism test. Variable Resilience GB Resilience treated 0.0194***

(0.0031) 0.0456** (0.0192) 0.0186*** (0.0031) GB 0.0182*** (0.0063) Constant 0.0406*** (0.007) 0.3843*** (0.0431) 0.0336*** (0.0074) Controls YES YES YES City FE YES YES YES Year FE YES YES YES N 741 741 741 Adj.R2 0.9306 0.7442 0.9314 Sobel Z 1.835* https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0335736.t005 Fig 6. Transmission pathways and effect decomposition. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0335736.g006