The Impact of Energy Transition on Residents’ Health: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment of China’s New Energy Demonstration City Pilot Program

Promoting the green transition of the energy structure is crucial for achieving climate mitigation and safeguarding public health. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies, this paper takes the New Energy Demonstration City pilot (NEDCP) program as a quasi-natural experiment to empirically examine energy transition’s impact on residents’ health. The results show that the NEDCP program significantly improves residents’ health, with benefits that are almost equal to those of regular physical exercise. This finding remains robust after a series of robustness and endogeneity checks. Mechanism analyses indicate that the NEDCP program promotes the substitution of traditional fossil energy with new energy, improving environmental quality, and thereby enhancing residents’ health. Moreover, rising carbon prices and stricter urban environmental regulation further amplify these health benefits. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that the impact of the NEDCP program on residents’ health is more pronounced among vulnerable populations, including smokers and older adults, as well as in resource-dependent, economically underdeveloped, and environmentally underregulated cities, highlighting the NEDCP program’s positive role in advancing health equity across different demographic groups and regions. This study offers valuable insights into how the NEDCP program promotes public health and advances health equity.