Has the establishment of national key ecological function areas reduced climate risk?

Climate risk is one of the important challenges facing the globe. To address the risks of ecological degradation and climate change, China has designated National Key Ecological Functional Areas (NKEFAs) in successive batches. As an important ecological policy for achieving environmental protection and spatial management, their establishment plays a crucial role in improving ecological conditions and mitigating climate risk. This study treats the establishment of NKEFAs as a quasi-natural experiment. It uses 1990-2022 panel data from prefecture-level cities and employs a staggered difference-in-difference (DID) model to assess the impact of NKEFAs on climate risk. It is found that the establishment of NKEFAs reduces climate risk, and this finding passes a series of robustness tests. NKEFAs reduce climate risk mainly by optimizing industrial structure, improving environmental quality, and reducing CO₂ emissions. Further analysis reveals that NKEFAs have significant heterogeneity impact on reducing climate risk across resource carrying capacity, resource endowment, and urban location. It shows a pronounced reducing effect in windbreak-and-sand-fixing and soil-and-water conservation ecological functional areas, and the policy's impact on reducing climate risk is more significant for non-resource-based cities, eastern cities, and central cities. Based on this, future efforts should focus on strengthening the long-term development of NKEFAs, promoting the coordination between ecological conservation and industrial planning, and enhancing environmental governance capacity to accelerate the low-carbon transition. Differentiated policies should be formulated according to local ecological and climatic conditions to achieve effective and sustained climate risk management.