Coupling Coordination and Interactive Response Analysis of Ecological Environment and Urban Resilience in the Yangtze River Economic Belt

There is a complex dynamic coupling interaction process between the ecological environment and urban resilience. It is important to clarify the coordination relationship and interactive response mechanism between them for sustainable development construction of the Yangtze River Economic Belt. The coupling coordination degree model and the panel vector autoregressive model (PVAR) were adopted to quantitatively examine the dynamic coordination and interactive response of the ecological environment and urban resilience in the Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2000 to 2019. Our study’s results are the following: (1) The ecological environment index and urban resilience index have a generally positive trend of fluctuation and increase during the study period but show significant regional differentiation. (2) The coupling coordination degree of ecological environment and urban resilience in the Yangtze River Economic Belt increased steadily, forming a spatial distribution pattern of “strong in the east and weak in the west”, with cities in the region mainly at the basic coordination level and generally lagging behind in development. (3) Both the ecological environment and urban resilience systems in the Yangtze River Economic Belt have significant self-reinforcing mechanisms, but the reinforcing effect is gradually decreasing, and the two positively promote each other, with urban resilience showing a more obvious promoting effect on the ecological environment.