Measuring urban ecological resilience across prefecture level cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt using a PSR composite index

Abstract

Urban ecological resilience is critical for reconciling ecological protection with high-quality development in rapidly urbanizing river-basin corridors. Evidence remains limited, however, on how resilience evolves across the full set of prefecture-level cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB), how it differs across sub-regions, and whether major metropolitan centers occupy resilient or vulnerable positions in the basin-wide distribution. This study evaluates urban ecological resilience for 108 prefecture-level and above cities in the YREB from 2014 to 2023 using a Pressure-State-Response (PSR) composite index. We constructed the Urban Ecological Resilience Index (UERI) via entropy weights and examined it through descriptive statistics, kernel density estimation (KDE), Dagum Gini coefficient decomposition, and spatial autocorrelation analysis. Basin-wide mean UERI rose from 0.4571 in 2014 to a peak of 0.5266 in 2020, before declining to 0.5120 in 2023. Cross-city dispersion narrowed over the decade: the standard deviation fell from 0.0851 in 2014 to 0.0531 in 2022, then rebounded slightly to 0.0558 in 2023. Spatial autocorrelation was positive and significant but modest, with Global Moran''s I rising from 0.082 in 2014 to 0.145 in 2019 and declining to 0.092 in 2023. Low–low (LL) clusters remained dominant and expanded to 62 cities by 2023, whereas high–high (HH) clusters contracted to 4. Dagum decomposition reveals that transvariation density contributed the largest share of overall disparity (35.06% on average), followed by inter-regional (34.40%) and intra-regional differences (30.54%). Trajectory analyses further show that several major cities (Wuhan, Chengdu, Nanjing, Suzhou, Xuzhou) remained persistently in the lower tail of the distribution. These results indicate broad improvement with post-2020 weakening, persistent central-city low resilience, and substantial cross-regional positional mismatch. The findings support composite-index diagnosis and suggest that future work should examine indicator-level mechanisms and hydrologically informed spatial connectivity.