Weathering the Climate Storm: Climate Risk and Urban Export Resilience

Jingmei Ma, Kaixin Deng and Jie Wu

Growth and Change, 2026, vol. 57, issue 2

Abstract: Against the backdrop of increasingly frequent extreme weather events worldwide, urban export resilience is under severe threat, and mitigating the adverse effects of climate risk has become an urgent issue for China's pursuit of high‐quality development in its open economy. Focusing on prefecture‐level and above cities in China, this study combines customs export data and city‐level panel data for 2010–2022, quantifies climate risk using text mining and machine learning methods, and constructs an export resilience index incorporating both stability and safety from dynamic and structural perspectives. On this basis, it empirically examines both the direct effect of climate risk on export resilience and the underlying mechanisms. The results show that: (1) Climate risk significantly weakens urban export resilience, and this finding remains robust after addressing endogeneity and conducting multiple robustness tests. (2) The negative impact is more pronounced in central and western cities, in cities outside the Yangtze River Economic Belt, and in small cities, and is further amplified in cities with lower levels of artificial intelligence, market integration, and trade openness. (3) The digital economy and industrial structure play mediating roles in the relationship between climate risk and export resilience. In addition, technological innovation significantly moderates the climate risk‐digital economy‐export resilience pathway by strengthening the buffering effect of the digital economy, thereby indirectly alleviating the adverse impact of climate risk. These findings are consistent with China's strategic objective of advancing climate adaptation and open development in tandem under the dual‐carbon agenda. They also provide policy implications for enhancing urban export resilience in a differentiated manner.

Date: 2026
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