New Quality Productive Forces and Urban Eco-Environmental Resilience: Nonlinear Evidence from Chinese Cities Toward Sustainable Development

Against the background of green transformation and sustainable urban development, improving urban eco-environmental resilience (UER) is essential for enhancing ecological security and long-term urban sustainability. Using panel data from 260 Chinese cities from 2006 to 2023, this study constructs a new quality productive forces (NQPF) index based on new-quality laborers, new-quality means of labor, and new-quality labor objects, and measures UER from the dimensions of resistance, recovery, and adaptation. The results show that: (1) NQPF has a significant U-shaped effect on UER, indicating that it may inhibit UER in the early stage due to transformation costs and insufficient institutional adaptation but promotes UER after crossing a certain development level; (2) NQPF improves both green innovation level (GIL) and green innovation efficiency (GIE), while GIL faces short-term transformation constraints and GIE more directly enhances UER; (3) threshold, heterogeneity, and spatial analyses show that the positive effect of NQPF is stronger in cities with higher economic development levels and in the eastern region, and both NQPF and UER exhibit spatial clustering. This study provides empirical evidence for promoting productivity upgrading, ecological resilience, and sustainable urban transition.