Interaction between industrial development and environmental effects in China’s economy: A comprehensive evaluation

The industrial is a core driver of China’s modern social and economic development, and its interaction with environmental effects is critical to achieving harmonious, sustainable societal progress. To quantify conflicts between industrial development and environmental effects, a stress model was developed based on a comprehensive evaluation index system of industrial developmental status, integrating the index construction method, stress-response framework, and system GMM estimator for empirical analysis.A key novelty of this study is the identification and verification of an ecological turning point in China’s industrial-environmental interaction, which clarifies the threshold effect of economic development on the coordinated development of industry and the environment.The results explicitly guiding future work for policymakers, industrial practitioners, and environmental researchers, include: (1) a mutual coercion effect exists between industrial development and environmental effects; (2) when economic development crosses the ecological turning point, both industrial development level and environmental quality reach relatively high levels, whereas economically backward regions exhibit the opposite trend; (3) the industrial development-environmental effect relationship follows a U-shaped curve in eastern and central regions but a negative linear relationship in western regions. Therefore, the government should accelerate the layout and cultivation of green industries to enhance environmental protection, comprehensively improve environmental livability, suitability, and functionality, establish a new development paradigm, and vigorously integrate science and technology with industrial development to promote the sustainable evolution of both industrial development and environmental quality.