Digital Infrastructure as a Systemic Buffer: Climate Risk, Agricultural Resilience, and the Full-Chain Mechanisms in China

Extreme climate disasters have become a major challenge to economic and social development worldwide. As a major agricultural country, China’s agricultural sector is particularly vulnerable to climate change. This study constructs an Agricultural Industrial Resilience (AIR) index from three dimensions—resistance, adaptation, and transformation—and uses panel data for 180 prefecture-level cities in China from 2006 to 2023 to examine the impact of climate risk on AIR and its underlying mechanisms. From the perspective of the agricultural value chain, we identify three key transmission channels—production efficiency, transport capacity, and market linkages—and further investigate the buffering role of digital infrastructure and regional heterogeneity. The results show that climate shocks significantly weaken AIR, and the mechanism tests provide empirical evidence consistent with the proposed production-efficiency, transport, and market-linkage channels, as reflected in agricultural total factor productivity (ATFP), transport infrastructure, and agricultural trade linkages. The moderated mediation analysis further shows that the negative indirect associations along the production-efficiency, transport-infrastructure, and agricultural-trade-linkage channels are significantly weaker at higher levels of digital infrastructure, providing further evidence of its buffering role. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the negative effect of climate shocks on AIR is more pronounced in non-major grain-producing regions. These findings suggest that building an intelligent and coordinated climate adaptation system covering the entire agricultural value chain can help strengthen the climate resilience of agricultural industrial systems and provide Chinese evidence and a theoretical basis for enhancing AIR under increasing global climate risks.