Laissez-faire or policy intervention: How climate policy shape urban energy systems resilience

Improving energy system resilience (ESR) is crucial for modern industrial system development. This study employs multi-cycle models and combined PSM–DID methods to empirically evaluate the impact of climate policies (CPs) on ESR, potential mechanisms, and driving pathways. The findings indicate that CP significantly enhances ESR, satisfies the parallel trend hypothesis, and passes several robustness tests (i.e., placebo test, replacing the matching method, adding control variables, tail reduction, and a double machine learning model). Heterogeneity analysis reveals that environmental protection cities, non-resource cities and large cities benefit more from CP. Additionally, green technology innovation has a nonlinear mediating influence on the effect of CP on urban ESR. Cities can improve ESR using efficiency- and finance-driven approaches. These findings contribute to understanding the correlation between environmental and climate policies and urban ESR, providing valuable insights for local governments’ effective CP strategy development.