Ecological resilience of city clusters in the middle reaches of Yangtze river.

As sustainable development has become a trending consensus, urban ecological resilience is now a significant metric for assessing the extent of urban ecological advancement. In view of the critical roles for promoting coordinated regional development, this research evaluates the ecological resilience of 28 cities in city clusters in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River from 2009 to 2020 using the entropy weight method and analyzes the spatio-temporal evolution pattern of ecological resilience. This study uses the Moran index and the spatial Durbin model to explore the spatial correlation of ecological resilience as well as the influencing factors and presents the following conclusions. First, ecological resilience appears to be on an upward trend in time, spatially characterized by a transition from higher resilience in the east region to lower resilience in the west region. Second, spatial autocorrelation in ecological resilience exhibits a positive relationship. Most cities in Jiangxi Province are high-high agglomerative cities, while most cities in Hunan and Hubei Provinces are low-low homogeneous cities and high-low polarized cities, respectively. Third, given that population density, economic development, and financial development negatively affect ecological resilience, government green investment has a positive effect and positive spatial spillovers. Based on the findings, this paper offers targeted policy recommendations on how cities can improve urban ecological resilience. [Display omitted] • Enriching existing research by focusing on city clusters in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. • Constructing an ecological resilience evaluation system based on the theory of resistance-adaptation-recovery. • Detailed analysis of the spatial and temporal evolution patterns of ecological resilience in city clusters. • Spatial factors are introduced to analyze the spatial correlation and influencing factors of ecological resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]