Promoting the sustainable development of resource-based cities is an important task for deepening regional coordinated development and building an ecological civilization society. The SBM model was used to calculate the energy utilization efficiency of 282 prefecture level cities in China from 2006 to 2021 from three aspects, such as input, expected output and unexpected output. The National Resource based City Sustainable Development Plan(2013—2020) is regarded as a quasi natural experiment, and the impact of sustainable development policies on energy utilization efficiency is examined using the difference in differences method. It is found that the implementation of sustainable development policies has a significant positive impact on the energy efficiency of resource-based cities, and this conclusion still holds true after a series of robustness tests.

resource-based cities  /  energy utilization efficiency  /  double difference method