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.