Lingfu Zhang

Climate risks drive dynamic adjustments to global climate policies, creating significant climate policy uncertainty (CPU). This uncertainty profoundly affects enterprises’ survival and sustainable development. A key question emerges: how do enterprises’ perception of CPU influence their resilience? To answer this, this study adopts a capability perspective and empirically examines the impact of climate policy uncertainty perception (CPUP) on enterprise resilience (RESI) and the underlying mechanism. Using panel data on Chinese A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2009 to 2023, the study defines CPUP as the interaction between a news-based provincial CPU index and the frequency of climate risk words in annual report texts, and measures RESI with the entropy weight method across four dimensions (business volatility, long-term growth, short-term performance, and enterprise survival). Panel regression with fixed effects indicates that CPUP significantly enhances RESI. A one-standard-deviation increase in CPUP raises RESI by approximately 0.0019 index units, equivalent to about 2.2% of the standard deviation of RESI. This effect is more pronounced for enterprises in the eastern and central regions and in high-carbon industries. Mechanism tests confirm that CPUP boosts RESI by optimizing management capabilities and strengthening development capabilities, revealing a capability-driven path between CPUP and RESI. This study enriches the theoretical understanding of CPU’s economic consequences and RESI antecedents from a capability perspective. It also provides empirical references for enterprises to build resilience amid policy fluctuations and for policymakers to formulate regionally differentiated climate policies.

With the frequent occurrence of various emergencies, the stable operation of enterprises has been seriously affected, and the research of resilience has received more and more attention in various fields. Enterprise resilience (En_RES) is not only related to corporate survival but is also the key to determining whether a company can realize long-term development. To explore the impact of En_RES on enterprise sustainable development (En_SD), this paper conducts an empirical test using panel regression models based on the data of A-share listed companies in China from 2004 to 2022. It is found that En_RES has a significant positive contribution to En_SD, which is more obvious when the degree of environmental uncertainty is lower, the degree of information sharing is higher, and the degree of business complexity is higher. The mechanism test analysis finds that En_RES can further contribute to En_SD by reducing the bankruptcy risk, improving credit availability, and optimizing resource allocation efficiency. This paper innovatively analyzes and verifies the impact of En_RES on En_SD and its functioning mechanism from the perspective of microenterprises, which not only enrich the theoretical relationship between En_RES and En_SD but also provide important references for enterprises to pay attention to and develop resilience in practice, which can help enterprises better cope with challenges, grasp opportunities, and make contributions to the sustainable development of enterprises.