The effects of low-carbon city pilot policy on urban land green use efficiency: evidence from 284 cities in China

China’s low-carbon city pilot (LCCP) initiative aims at devising and implementing a holistic strategy for fostering environmentally sustainable economic progress. This ambitious and multidimensional transition towards a green economy carries implications across economic, social, and environmental domains. This study explores whether the LCCP policy effectively contributes to enhancing urban land green use efficiency (ULGUE). Harnessing data collected from a sample of 284 Chinese cities between 2004 and 2019, we employ the super-efficiency SBM model to gauge ULGUE and utilize a time-varying Difference-in-Differences (DID) method along with a quasi-experimental design to scrutinize the specific influence of the LCCP policy. The empirical results reveal that the LCCP policy significantly boosts ULGUE in pilot cities, yielding a marked increment of 3.23%. This facilitative impact materializes as the policy drives industrial restructuring and fosters technological innovation within these cities. Notably, however, the effectiveness of the LCCP policy on ULGUE varies considerably across different Chinese regions. It exerts a particularly supportive effect in eastern areas, leading to an average ULGUE increase of 7.68%, whereas it fails to register any statistically significant influence on ULGUE in the central and western parts of China. Furthermore, the analysis indicates that the LCCP policy’s impact on ULGUE demonstrates a more substantial improvement in non-old industrial base (NOIB) cities and non-resource-based (NRB) cities relative to other city types. These findings enrich the scholarly discourse around the LCCP policy and provide useful experiences for other developing nations, thereby broadening the comprehension of viable strategies for sustainable urban development worldwide.