As global climate change aggravates, reducing energy consumption and environmental pollution is essential to sustainable economic development. This paper measures the energy-environmental efficiency of 284 prefecture-level cities in China using a non-radial directional distance function (NDDF) and data envelopment analysis (DEA), and evaluates the impact of the establishment of national new zones on energy-environmental efficiency using the multi-period difference-in-difference model (DID). We find that establishing national new zones improves the energy-environmental efficiency of the prefecture-level cities in which they are located by 13%-25% by enhancing the cities' green technical efficiency and scale efficiency. In addition, national new zones have both negative and positive spatial spillover effects, inhibiting the energy-environmental efficiency of cities within 50 km, and promoting the energy-environmental efficiency of cities around 300 km by a smaller value. In terms of heterogeneity, on the one hand, the impact of establishing national new zones on energy-environmental efficiency increases with larger quantile of the latter; on the other hand, National new zones with the one-city layout have significant stimulating impacts on energy-environmental efficiency, but those with the two-city layout have no significant impact, which means there is no significant green synergistic development impact among cities.

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