How public attention drives urban climate governance across mitigation and adaptation: evidence from Chinese cities

Abstract

Global climate change requires coordinated mitigation and adaptation, and improving urban climate governance capacity is essential for sustainable ecological development worldwide. Digital public climate attention represents an important cognitive and informational dimension of climate governance and may influence how cities respond to climate challenges through information diffusion, public expectations, and governance incentives. Using panel data covering 275 prefecture-level cities in China from 2012 to 2023, this study measures urban public climate attention based on the Baidu Index. Following the IPCC climate governance framework, an indicator system is established to systematically evaluate comprehensive urban climate governance performance from the dual dimensions of mitigation and adaptation. This study empirically examines the impact, mechanisms, and spatial spillover effects of public climate attention on urban climate governance performance. The results show that: First, public climate attention significantly improves comprehensive urban climate governance performance, with a notably stronger effect on mitigation performance than on adaptation performance. Second, public climate attention influences climate governance performance through two channels: promoting the development of green finance and facilitating enterprise green technological innovation. Third, the promoting effect exhibits diminishing marginal returns as cities improve their initial level of climate governance. Fourth, regional heterogeneity exists in these effects, which are substantially more pronounced in central and western cities than in eastern cities. Finally, public climate attention generates a negative spatial spillover effect, indicating a negative spatial association between public climate attention and neighboring cities’ governance performance. These findings highlight the importance of strengthening regional coordination and collaboration to achieve more balanced urban climate governance.