Shaping Urban Ecological Resilience with Artificial Intelligence Pilot Zone Policies Empirical Evidence from Multi-dimensional Ecological Indicators in China

Abstract

This study provides solid empirical evidence for the ecological resilience dimension of AI pilot zones driving sustainable urban development. Urban ecological resilience—defined as a socio-ecological system's capacity to withstand external shocks, absorb disturbances, and achieve dynamic adaptive reorganization—serves as a vital anchor for sustainable urban development. Exploiting the quasi-natural experiment generated by China's National Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Development Pilot Zones, this study investigates how artificial intelligence policy reshapes urban ecological resilience. Utilizing a balanced panel of 280 Chinese prefecture-level cities spanning 2000 to 2022, we construct a comprehensive Urban Ecological Resilience Index () under the Pressure-State-Response (PSR) framework using the time-series global entropy method. Combining Two-Way Fixed Effects Difference-in-Differences, Double Machine Learning (DML), augmented Bartik instrumental variables, mechanism analysis, and Spatial Durbin DID, we systematically identify policy effects, dimensional structures, transmission mechanisms, and spatial spillovers. Our empirical findings demonstrate that: (1) AI pilot zone establishment significantly enhances composite urban ecological resilience (baseline TWFE estimate = 2.8500, DML = 2.8124, ), generating persistent dynamic treatment effects that survive rigorous pre-trend validations and 500-iteration Monte Carlo permutation placebos. (2) Decomposing resilience reveals a distinct structural asymmetry: the policy aggressively suppresses environmental pressure loads (3.1200) and bolsters governance responses (+4.2000), while steadily expanding baseline biophysical carrying states (+1.4500). (3) Green technological innovation (28.8%) and environmental enforcement intensity (which may capture both regulatory stringency and underlying violation rates) (25.6%) represent the primary micro-level transmission conduits, reinforced by industrial structural upgrading (18.9%), with separate channel-specific coefficient decompositions corresponding to 73.3% of the total baseline estimate. (4) Treatment effects are amplified in legacy industrial bases, resource-dependent cities, and water-abundant regions, while radiating substantial positive spatial spillovers to geographically connected cities, with larger weights assigned to closer cities (using a row-standardized inverse-distance spatial weight matrix) (31.9% of total spatial impact). This study offers crucial theoretical and policy insights for leveraging intelligent technologies to cultivate resilient urban ecosystems worldwide. UERI is an index-based proxy for urban ecological resilience rather than a direct observation of resilience capacity.