Assessment of the Construction of a Climate Resilient City: An Empirical Study Based on the Difference in Differences Model.

Facing climate risks has become a common problem for mankind and a topic of great importance for the Chinese government. To thoroughly implement the overall requirements for the construction of an ecological civilization and effectively improve the capacity of cities to adapt to climate change, China launched the pilot construction of "Climate Resilient Cities" in 2017. In this paper, 16 prefecture level cities in Anhui Province of China were selected as the research objects, and the multi-level grey system evaluation method was used to measure the climate resilience of these regions. We used the difference in differences method to evaluate the effect of the pilot policy of "Climate Resilient Cities." The pilot policies of the "Climate Resilient Cities" showed a significant contribution to the regional climate resilience, and, after isolating the impact of other factors on the regional climate resilience, the pilot policies of the "Climate Resilient Cities" increased the climate resilience of the pilot cities by four percentage points. The pilot policies of the "Climate Resilient Cities" had a significant contribution to the urban infrastructure development and ecological space optimization, as well as non-significant impacts to the urban water security, emergency management capacity-building, and science and technology innovation initiatives.

Improvement of Eco-Efficiency in China: A Comparison of Mandatory and Hybrid Environmental Policy Instruments.

China's environmental problems have long been criticized. The Communist Party of China (CPC) and the government have increasingly paid attention to developing environmental protection and included the construction of an ecological civilization in the "Five-in-One" development strategy. The improvement of regional eco-efficiency is an important way to realize the coordinated development of the entire society, and environmental policy instruments are a powerful means to enhance regional eco-efficiency. This paper categorizes environmental policy instruments into mandatory, hybrid, and voluntary types. Based on panel data from 31 provinces in China from 2005 to 2015, the paper discusses the impact of environmental policy instruments on regional eco-efficiency and the means of the impact. The research shows that (1) mandatory and hybrid environmental policy instruments play a significant role in promoting regional eco-efficiency, while the role of voluntary instruments is not significant in promoting regional eco-efficiency; (2) hybrid and mandatory environmental policy instruments have negative interactions; and (3) the level of economic development will positively affect the role of hybrid environmental policy instruments in promoting regional eco-efficiency but negatively affect the role of mandatory instruments in promoting regional efficiency.