The Impact of Climate-Adaptive City Construction on Green Total Factor Productivity: Evidence from China

Against the backdrop of escalating global climate risks, reconciling economic expansion with ecological sustainability has emerged as a core challenge for urban sustainable development worldwide. This study leverages China’s Climate-Adaptive City Pilot Policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employs staggered difference-in-differences (DID) estimation on panel data covering 280 Chinese cities from 2006 to 2024 to evaluate the policy’s causal effect on urban green total factor productivity (GTFP). The empirical results yield three key findings. First, climate-adaptive urban construction delivers a significant improvement in GTFP, with a pronounced time-lagged effect: the policy exerts no statistically significant impact in the short term but generates substantial positive outcomes in the long run, verifying the dynamic implications of the strong Porter hypothesis. Second, mechanism analysis reveals two valid transmission channels through which the policy boosts GTFP, namely the expansion of firm entry (particularly the entry of non-polluting enterprises) and the agglomeration of high-skilled talents. Notably, the talent agglomeration channel is only effective in cities with advanced economic development. Dynamic tests further confirm that both firm entry and talent agglomeration responses to the policy follow consistent short-term insignificant and long-term significant patterns. Third, heterogeneous analysis demonstrates that the policy’s green growth dividends are more prominent in southern cities, non-resource-based cities, and national transportation hub cities. This study extends the existing literature on the green efficiency effects of climate adaptation policies and provides empirical evidence and differentiated policy insights for optimizing urban green transformation governance in the new era.