Green or growth? Unveiling the eco-environmental consequence of cross-border e-commerce pilots in China

The rapid growth of cross-border e-commerce has unlocked new opportunities for trade and economic vitality, yet its potential eco-environmental consequences remain poorly understood. This study provides a systematic evaluation of whether and how China's Cross-Border E-Commerce Zones ( CBECZ ) project impacts urban eco-environmental quality ( EEQ ). Our findings reveal that the CBECZ project induces an annual 0.99% decline in EEQ among participating cities, offsetting the 0.17% annual improvement. This eco-environmental degradation translates to an annual economic cost of 1.68 billion yuan for the average sample city, equivalent to 168-337 RMB yuan per capita. The negative impacts are attributed to logistics expansion, increased industrial, logistics and warehousing land areas, and rising temporary population density. Further discussion and heterogeneity analyses demonstrate that reconciling digital economic growth with long-term environmental sustainability constitutes a fundamental challenge in sustainability transitions. Policy design could explicitly account for jurisdiction-specific environmental governance, ecosystem vulnerability, and territorial heterogeneity to appropriately navigate development-conservation trade-offs.