How does building climate-resilient cities affect food production: evidence from pilot policies in China

Ensuring food security is a crucial foundation for macroeconomic stability and social welfare. Against the backdrop of intensifying climate change, frequent extreme weather events, and rising uncertainty in agricultural production, identifying systematic and forward-looking adaptation pathways has become increasingly important. This paper examines whether the Climate-Resilient Cities Policy (CRCP) is associated with changes in the spillover effects of food production at the city level in China. Using city-level panel data from China for 2005–2024, the study treats the rollout of the pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) framework to estimate the policy’s impact on per capita food production. The results indicate that CRCP is positively associated with increases in per capita grain production in pilot areas, and this finding remains robust after parallel trends tests, placebo tests, PSM-DID estimates, substitution of dependent variables, and control for contemporaneous policies. Mechanism tests suggest that the policy may operate by enhancing agricultural technological innovation, expanding new digital infrastructure, and improving traditional infrastructure conditions. Since these channel analyses are primarily based on city-level indicators rather than direct household-level evidence of intermediation, the findings should be interpreted as potential mechanisms rather than a complete decomposition of causal pathways. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the policy effects are stronger in prefecture-level cities along the Hu Huanyong Line and in resource-based cities. This paper provides new evidence on the cross-sectoral benefits of urban climate adaptation policies and offers policy implications for integrating climate governance, urban resilience, and food security.