5 NOVEMBER 2021 • VOL 374 ISSUE 6568 675
T
he 40 wind turbines dotting the
rolling grassland 9 kilometers
south of Zhanatas, an impover-
ished industrial town in southern
Kazakhstan, are monuments to
change. Each as tall as a 50-story
building, the towers dominate
the arid landscape. Completed in
June, the $160 million Zhanatas
Wind Farm has a capacity of 100 mega-
watts (MW), making it one of the most
powerful wind farms in central Asia. It’s a
milestone in Kazakhstan’s quest to boost
reliance on renewables and achieve car-
bon neutrality by 2060. The country has
300 years’ worth of coal, but isn’t building
a single new plant to burn it.
The project stands out for another rea-
son as well: It is one of the biggest renew-
able energy projects built in the region
under China’s Belt and Road Initiative
(BRI), a colossal infrastructure plan that
has alarmed environmental advocates.
Launched in 2013, BRI links China to
markets and sources of raw materials
around the world while stimulating eco-
nomic growth in developing countries. It
is providing much-needed power plants,
roads, ports, and railways in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America. But the “infrastructure
tsunami” also threatens to “open a Pando-
ra’s box of environmental crises, including
large-scale deforestation, habitat fragmen-
tation, wildlife poaching, water pollution
and greenhouse gas emissions,” ecologist
William Laurance of James Cook University,
Cairns, wrote in The Conversation in 2017.
China countered such criticism by put-
ting an environmentally friendly face on
BRI. In June 2017, its Ministry of Eco-
logy and Environment issued “Guidelines
on Promoting Green Belt and Road,” and
President Xi Jinping himself said in April
2019 that BRI “aims to promote green
development.” That same month, China
established a BRI International Green
Development Coalition, which brings
together government agencies, non-
governmental organizations, and think
tanks to study ways to make BRI invest-
ments environmentally sustainable.
Two years after Xi’s pronouncement, the
initiative has a greener cast. Chinese-funded
coal power is in retreat, as environmental
concerns dovetail with economic forces.
Of the 52 coal-fired power plants with Chi-
nese backing announced in BRI countries
between 2014 and 2020, only one has gone
into operation. Another seven are under
construction and 11 are in planning; the re-
maining 33 have been shelved or canceled,
according to a June report by Christoph
Nedopil, a development economist at Fu-
dan University in Shanghai. Confirming
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