Digital economy, climate adaptation, and agricultural resilience: evidence from Chinese prefecture-level cities

This paper asks whether the digital economy can mitigate the adverse effect of climate physical risk on agricultural resilience. Using panel data for 274 prefecture-level cities in China from 2007 to 2023, we identify this relationship through the interaction between the Urban Digital Economy Index and the Climate Physical Risk Index in a two-way fixed-effects framework. The results show that the digital economy significantly attenuates the negative impact of climate risk on agricultural resilience, and this finding remains robust across multiple specifications. The paper contributes by integrating digitalization, measured climate physical risk, and agricultural resilience into one empirical framework, by adopting a disturbance-response measure based on primary industry added value, and by providing city-level evidence on the resilience value of digital development under climate stress.