Spatial Evolution Characteristics and Influencing Factors of Urban Green Innovation in China

Cities are important carriers of green innovation. The foundation for accelerating China’s ecological civilization construction and fostering regionally coordinated and sustainable development is quantitative analysis of the spatial evolution pattern and influencing factors of urban green innovation, as well as revealing the development differences between regions. This study’s research object includes 284 Chinese cities that are at the prefecture level or above, excluding Xizang, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan of China due to incomplete data. The spatial evolution characteristics of urban green innovation in China between 2005 and 2021 are comprehensively described using the gravity center model and boxplot analysis. The factors that affect urban green innovation are examined using the spatial Durbin model (SDM). The findings indicate that: 1) over the period of the study, the gravity center of urban green innovation in China has always been distributed in the Henan-Anhui border region, showing a migration characteristic of “initially shifting northeast, subsequently southeast”, and the migration speed has gradually increased. 2) Although there are also noticeable disparities in east-west, the north-south gap is the main cause of the shift in China’s urban green innovation gravity center. The primary areas of urban green innovation in China are the cities with green innovation levels higher than the median. 3) The main influencing factor of urban green innovation is the industrial structure level. The effect of the financial development level, the government intervention level, and the openness to the outside world degree on urban green innovation is weakened in turn. The environmental regulation degree is not truly influencing urban green innovation. The impact of various factors on green innovation across cities of different sizes, exhibiting heterogeneity. This study is conducive to broadening the academic community’s comprehension of the spatial evolution characteristics of urban green innovation and offering a theoretical framework for developing policies for the all-encompassing green transformation of social and economic growth.