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 3 / 21 to the sustainable development of cities, some scholars suggest planning urban climate adaptation strategies from the perspective of urban resilience [20]. In summary, relative to mitigation measures to address climate change, climate adaptation construction in most coun- tries is still at an early stage of planning and implementation. Policy objectives primarily focus on short-term climate miti- gation, and a lack of emphasis on climate adaptation will lead to more serious climate disaster losses. As climate issues increasingly become a core risk affecting sustainable urban development, some scholars have called on managers to plan urban climate adaptation strategies from the urban resilience perspective. Therefore, this paper harmonizes climate adaptation policy objectives with urban resilience and defines the concept of “urban climate resilience.” Then, it takes China’s CACCP policy as the research object and selects a typical ecologically fragile area—the Yellow River Basin urban agglomeration—as the research sample to explore how climate adaptation policy can enhance the urban climate resil- ience. The marginal contributions of this paper are mainly in the following three aspects. First, based on the perspective of human adaptation to climate change over the long term, this paper defines the concept of “urban climate resilience.” This research promotes the application and development of urban resilience theory, clarifying policy objectives for human

adaptation to climate change. Second, this paper empirically analyzes the practical effects of China’s CACCP policy in typical ecologically fragile areas, revealing the effectiveness of climate adaptation policy planning and actions. This finding helps to strengthen the confidence of developing countries in climate adaptation actions. Third, this study further explores the mediating role of green bonds and the moderating roles of education, public environmental concern, and mineral resource dependency, revealing diversified driving mechanisms in climate adaptation policy governance. 2. Concept definition, policy background & research hypothesis 2.1. Concept definition The “resilience” theory has undergone an evolutionary process, transitioning from “engineering resilience” to “ecological resilience” to “socio-ecological resilience.” Resilience can be traced back to engineering science and fluid mechanics [21], which describes the resistance of materials or structures to external shocks. In 1973, Canadian ecologist Holling first introduced the concept of “resilience” into ecology, arguing that ecological resilience measures the persistence of a sys- tem and its ability to absorb changes and disturbances [11]. Compared with the traditional ecological concept that empha- sizes “steady state,” Ecological resilience emphasizes the dynamics of the system and multiple stable states. Based on the ecological resilience theory, Berkes, Folke, and Colding (1998) conceptualized nature and society as an interwoven

system that develops together, i.e., the socio-ecological system [22]. They believe that socio-ecological resilience reflects the socio-ecological system’s persistence, adaptability, and transformability. These theories offer crucial insights into the complex socio-ecological systems and their sustainable management, particularly in addressing climate change and miti- gating disasters. Since the 21st century, global urbanization has brought unprecedented environmental and social challenges. As the social demand for reducing urban disasters increases, urban resilience has garnered the attention of managers and academics. Scholars from different disciplines have various definitions of urban resilience, but social theorists have sharply criticized these definitions’ lack of conceptual clarity. In response to critical comments, Meerow, Newell, and Stults (2016) proposed a new definition of urban resilience, which refers to “the ability of an urban system-and all its constituent socio-ecological and socio-technical networks across temporal and spatial scales-to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems that limit current or future adaptive capacity.” [13] At the same time, they proposed the 5W principle to interpret the connotation of urban resilience. Unlike short-term disaster combating and mitigation planning in urban climate change response actions, climate-adaptive city construction should focus on urban resilience planning for long-term climate change [23]. The conno-

tation and significance of climate adaptation should be broader than climate mitigation planning, which focuses on “carbon