Urban climate resilience varies across space and time under climate hazard pressure in the Yangtze river delta urban agglomeration

Under intensifying climate change and rapid urbanization, urban agglomerations are increasingly exposed to climate hazards and socioeconomic pressures, making it important to understand whether improvements in adaptive capacity are sufficient to sustain urban resilience. Focusing on 26 cities in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration from 2000 to 2022, this study develops a multidimensional framework integrating climate Hazard, socioeconomic Exposure, and adaptive Capacity to evaluate a composite resilience index (RI), together with spatial analysis, interpretable machine learning, and future climate-hazard experiments. From 2000 to 2022, the regional mean Hazard increased from 0.219 to 0.409 and Exposure from 0.221 to 0.424, while Capacity increased from 0.320 to 0.587; nevertheless, RI declined from 0.610 to 0.564, indicating that gains in adaptive capacity did not fully offset the growth in climate and socioeconomic pressures. Among eight candidate models evaluated using a city-blocked design, xRFM achieved the strongest cross-city reconstruction performance. Model interpretation identified consecutive wet days, extreme-heat frequency, and tropical nights as the leading features associated with Hazard; built-up area, population ageing, and assets per capita with Exposure; environmental protection expenditure, waste treatment, and wastewater treatment with Capacity; and built-up area, environmental protection expenditure, and population ageing with RI. A 10% sample-perturbation analysis showed that the dominant feature-importance structure remained stable, with only minor changes near the fourth-ranked position for Exposure and RI. In the future climate-hazard experiment, Exposure and Capacity were held at their 2022 levels, and stronger late-century climate forcing produced progressively lower resilience, with regional mean RI values in 2100 of 0.526, 0.521, and 0.515 under SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, and SSP5-8.5, respectively. These findings reveal pronounced spatial and temporal differences in urban climate resilience and highlight the need to coordinate climate-risk reduction with sustained improvements in adaptive capacity across highly urbanized regions.