ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Water
Sec. Water Resource Management
This article is part of the Research TopicEnhancing Water Resilience: Integrating River Hydraulics and Green Economic Policies for Disaster MitigationView all articles
Research on the Impact of Digital Infrastructure Construction on Ecological Resilience in the Yellow River Basin —Empirical Evidence from 75 Cities in the Yellow River Basin
Provisionally accepted
- Quzhou University, Quzhou, China
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Well-developed digital infrastructure serves as a crucial vehicle and driving force for enhancing high-quality development and ecological environmental protection in the Yellow River Basin. Using a sample of 75 cities in the Yellow River Basin from 2014 to 2023, this paper investigates the impact mechanism and spillover effects of digital infrastructure construction on the basin's ecological resilience. The findings reveal that digital infrastructure construction in the Yellow River Basin significantly improves the level of ecological resilience, and this promotive effect exhibits an increasing trend over time. Further mechanism analysis indicates that digital infrastructure construction drives ecological resilience enhancement through effects of resource allocation optimization and innovation efficiency upgrading, and it demonstrates spatial linkage spillover effects. Heterogeneity tests show that the promotive effect of digital infrastructure is more pronounced in upstream and downstream cities of the Basin, constrained by the traditional industrial structure and functional positioning of the middle reaches. Furthermore, the study finds that the enhancing effect of digital infrastructure construction on ecological resilience is even greater in cities abundant in renewable energy. This research provides empirical evidence for objectively assessing the impact of digital infrastructure construction on the ecological resilience of the Yellow River Basin, contributing to the accelerated advancement of ecological protection and high-quality development, thereby facilitating the sustainable development of the Yellow River Basin.
Keywords: Yellow River Basin, digital infrastructure construction, Ecological resilience, Spatial spillover, Renewable Resources
Received: 03 Oct 2025; Accepted: 26 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhou. 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: Wenhui Zhou
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