Impact of China’s climate-resilient city policy on corporate environmental information disclosure

During our accelerating global climate change, environmental information disclosure serves as an important channel through which enterprises fulfill environmental responsibilities. Using Chinese A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2024, this study employs a difference-in-differences model to investigate the influence and underlying mechanisms of China’s Climate-Resilient City (CRC) policy on corporate environmental information disclosure. The findings show that the CRC policy significantly improves the quality of corporate environmental information disclosure. And this discovery still holds after a series of robustness tests. Mechanism analysis indicates that the policy enhances disclosure quality by strengthening corporate environmental awareness, increasing environmental investment, and improving external concern of green investors and the public environment. Heterogeneity analysis further shows that the effect is more pronounced among nonkey polluting and nonheavily polluting enterprises and in regions with stronger environmental regulation intensity and higher extreme climate risk. Analysis of economic consequences indicates that improvements in disclosure quality driven by the pilot policy lead to higher corporate environmental, social, and governance ratings and facilitate green transformation. This study identifies important institutional factors influencing corporate environmental information disclosure quality in the context of intensifying climate change, providing important practical implications for advancing global climate governance.