TY - JOUR AU - Xu, Jiaxi AU - Huang, Xiaoyun AU - Guo, Conglin AU - Huang, Yiran AU - Guo, Yang AU - Liu, Lingna TI - Enhancing regional ecological resilience through blue and green spaces in China JO - Carbon Footprints PY - 2026 VL - 5 IS - 4 SP - EP - 60 SN - ISSN 2831-932X (Online) AB -

Blue-green spaces (BGSs) are key material carriers for regional ecological resilience under accelerating climate change. Using panel data for 30 Chinese provincial-level regions over 2012-2024, this study constructs a three-dimensional ecological resilience index (resistance, adaptability and recoverability) and applies spatiotemporal econometric models to examine how BGSs affect ecological resilience, through which mechanisms, and with what spatial features. (1) BGSs significantly enhance ecological resilience. With the three BGS indicators standardized to z-scores, one-standard-deviation increases in per capita BGS area, blue-space share and green-space share raise the composite resilience score (0-1 scale) by 0.0625, 0.0096 and 0.0304 index points, equivalent to 0.86, 0.13 and 0.42 standard deviations of resilience (SD = 0.0724). The effect varies across geographic, institutional, resource-based and economic dimensions and follows a nonlinear, threshold-dependent pattern. (2) BGSs work through three parallel channels: carbon sinks, green technological innovation and external openness. For blue space, the indirect effect (+0.0178) is significantly positive while the direct effect (-0.0083) is significantly negative, a suppression configuration in which the indirect-to-total ratio (186.3%) is not a conventional mediation share; green space shows partial mediation (26.0%). (3) Under the inverse-distance matrix, spillover effects exceed local effects, with indirect-to-direct ratios of 9.59, 4.15 and 1.32 for blue space, green space and per capita BGS area; this ranking is matrix-dependent (the per capita BGS ratio falls to 0.54 under the K-nearest-neighbor matrix), and spillovers vary nonmonotonically with distance. The findings inform differentiated ecological governance and coordinated cross-regional protection.

KW - Ecological resilience KW - blue-green space KW - sustainable development KW - mediation effect KW - Spatial Durbin Model DO - 10.20517/cf.2026.117 UR - https://dx.doi.org/10.20517/cf.2026.117