Do Pilot Zones for Green Finance Reform and Innovation Policy Enhance China’s Energy Resilience?

The escalation of international geopolitical conflicts has triggered shocks in the global energy supply and demand pattern. The importance of increasing the resilience of energy systems to risk has become increasingly prominent. At the same time, energy demand has shown substantial growth, driven by the continuous expansion of economic scales. Improving utilization efficiency to enhance energy resilience while achieving coordinated development between economic growth and environmental protection has become a critical priority. This study takes pilot zones for green finance reform and innovations as a quasi-natural experiment and selects panel data from 30 provinces in China from 2013 to 2022 as the research sample. The empirical analysis constructs a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) model to investigate the impact of pilot zones for green finance reform and innovations on energy resilience, while exploring their heterogeneity and mechanism of action. The research shows that: ① The policy of pilot zones for green finance reform and innovations has significantly enhanced China’s energy resilience capacity. This conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests. ② Mechanism analysis shows that the pilot zones for green finance reform and innovation policy enhance energy resilience by elevating green innovation capacity and optimizing industrial structure. ③ Heterogeneity analysis reveals that policy effects exhibit significant regional disparities. The enhancement effect of pilot zones for green finance reform and innovation policy on energy resilience is more pronounced in the eastern region compared to the central and western regions. This research provides empirical evidence and theoretical support for local governments to refine green finance policy systems and explore novel pathways for optimizing energy resilience.