ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Policy and Governance
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1651610
Climate governance action and corporate environmental performance: Evidence from climate resilient city construction
Provisionally accepted
- 1The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
- 2Research Institute of Machinery Industry Economic & Management, Beijing, China
- 3Hunan University of Technology and Business, Changsha Shi, China
- 4Hunan First Normal University, Changsha, China
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Promoting the improvement of corporate environmental performance is an important microfoundation for achieving green high-quality development. This study takes Chinese A-share listed firms on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2011 to 2023 as the research sample, regards the climate resilient city construction (CRCC) pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment, and employs the difference-in-differences (DID) method to empirically examine its impact on corporate environmental performance. The empirical results show that CRCC significantly improves corporate environmental performance. This conclusion remains valid after a series of robustness tests, including the parallel trends test, placebo test, and PSM-DID. Mechanism analysis reveals that CRCC promotes the improvement of corporate environmental performance through three channels: enhancing urban environmental attention, strengthening environmental regulation intensity, and increasing corporate climate risk disclosure. Heterogeneity tests show that the policy effects are more pronounced in the southeast region of the "Hu Huanyong Line", non-state-owned firms, and heavily polluting industries. This study provides empirical evidence for understanding the microtransmission mechanism of climate resilient policies and offers insights for improving climate governance policies and promoting corporate green transitions.
Keywords: Climate resilient city construction, Corporate environmental performance, green transformation, Difference-in-differences method, Influencing mechanism
Received: 22 Jun 2025; Accepted: 21 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhou, Bao, Hu, Gao, Wen and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Xiliang Hu, Hunan University of Technology and Business, Changsha Shi, China
Chen Gao, Hunan University of Technology and Business, Changsha Shi, China
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