SCIENCE science.org 5 NOVEMBER 2021 • VOL 374 ISSUE 6568 677act as carbon sinks. Although many coun-
tries require environmental impact assess-
ments before construction begins, they are
often not public and rarely up to interna-
tional standards.
BRI’s growing investment in renewable
power “is certainly laudable,” Laurance
concludes. But the constellation of projects
still includes “an awful lot that will be en-
vironmentally destructive.”DEFINING BRI CAN be difficult. Xi first out-
lined the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-
Century Maritime Silk Road Development
Strategy during visits to Kazakhstan and
Indonesia in the fall of 2013, 6 months after
becoming president. Within months, Chi-
nese officials were describing a “One Belt,
One Road” plan—later renamed BRI—for
overland roads and railways
and shipping lanes connect-
ing ports in China and else-
where in Asia to Europe and
East Africa. It envisioned link-
ing some 60 countries, home
to half the world’s population.
Soon, the BRI label was
also used for pipelines, power
plants, cement factories, and
industrial facilities backed
by Chinese private and gov-
ernment lenders anywhere
in the world. There are even
proposed projects in the
Arctic (the Polar Silk Road),
and a space and cyberspace
initiative (the Belt and Road
Space Information Corridor).
More than 130 countries have
signed BRI memoranda of
understanding with China,
which pledge cooperation on
infrastructure and other projects, according
to the Belt and Road Portal website.
Analysts typically consider a project
part of BRI if it has Chinese backing and
is located in a country that has signed a
BRI memorandum. Still, “rather than be-
ing a coherent, geopolitically-driven grand
strategy, BRI is an extremely loose, inde-
terminate scheme, driven primarily by
competing domestic interests,” Lee Jones,
of Queen Mary University of London, and
Jinghan Zeng, of Lancaster University,
wrote in Third World Quarterly in 2019.
“The BRI has become an all-encompassing
slogan that domestic actors [use to] brand
their projects,” Zeng added in an email to
Science. That makes its cost elusive; es-
timates run anywhere from $1 trillion to
$8 trillion, though many consider the up-
per sum unrealistic.
The initiative’s amorphous character
also means “reliable, accurate maps of theBRI are almost nonexistent,” Alice Hughes, a
conservation biologist at the Xishuangbanna
Tropical Botanical Garden of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, wrote in a 2019 Conser-
vation Biology paper. Hughes filled the gap
herself by producing maps, now widely cited,
of BRI road and rail routes (see map, p. 678).
Western countries, wary of China’s increas-
ing influence, have warned that some proj-
ects are debt traps. Tiny Montenegro, in the
Balkans, owes $1 billion for an unfinished
highway that the country cannot afford and
many say it does not need, for example. Chi-
nese lenders could seize land in Montenegro
that was put up as collateral. Yet many de-
veloping countries do need the infrastruc-
ture. To sustain growth, eradicate poverty,
and respond to climate change, Asian coun-
tries—including China—will need to invest$26 trillion in infrastructure between 2016
and 2030, or $1.7 trillion per year, according
to a 2017 study by the Asian Development
Bank. With regional spending in 25 Asian
countries totaling only $881 billion in 2015,
BRI is partly filling the gap.
At the plan’s outset, there was little con-
cern for the environment, and China’s large
banks and engineering firms rushed to ex-
pand their coal businesses. In 2015, more
than 46% of BRI investment went into coal
plants, according to Nedopil’s report. By the
end of the decade, “people started to realize
there were a lot of problematic projects in
the pipeline,” says Li Shuo, a climate policy
adviser to Greenpeace East Asia. Decreasing
renewable electricity costs and pressure to
cut emissions dampened coal’s allure.
For example, the state-owned Industrial
and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) has
apparently lost interest in a $1.2 billion,
1050-MW coal-fired plant under construc-tion near the town of Lamu, Kenya, after
a group named deCOALonize won a court
order halting work on the plant in 2019.
(Meanwhile, a Chinese contractor completed
Kenya’s first solar power station, a 50-MW,
$130 million installation northeast of Nai-
robi, in 2020.) ICBC also recently withdrew
from a $3 billion, 2800-MW coal-fired plant
in Zimbabwe, according to news reports, and
Egypt and Bangladesh both shelved plans for
new coal plants financed by China.
The course change is essential to limiting
global warming. If BRI countries followed
historic patterns of fossil fuel use rising in
tandem with economic growth, their emis-
sions “would be enough to induce nearly
3 degrees of warming even if the rest of the
world takes 2-degree compliant action,”
warned a 2019 study by economist Ma
Jun of Tsinghua University
in Beijing and Simon Zadek
of the Finance for Biodiver-
sity Initiative, a U.K. non-
governmental organization.
China’s about-face won’t be
enough, however: Despite the
country’s image as the world’s
foremost promoter of coal,
Japanese and Western private
institutions financed 87% of
new coal power capacity out-
side China that went online
or into development between
2013 and mid-2019, according
to a July report from Xinyue
Ma and Kevin Gallagher of
the Global Development Policy
Center at Boston University.
The pair called on the G-20
grouping of the world’s larg-
est economies “to commit
to limiting all overseas fossil
fuel financing, starting with overseas coal
finance.” Climate advocates are also seeking
incentives for countries to retire existing coal
power plants early so they aren’t spewing
carbon dioxide for another 4 to 5 decades.BUT BRI’S MAIN alternative for coal, hydro-
power, has its own problems. Dams dis-
turb rivers’ natural flows and can degrade
riverine ecosystems and block migratory
fish from spawning and feeding grounds.
And dam construction often requires ac-
cess roads later used for illegal logging and
wildlife poaching.
Most of BRI’s renewable spending has
gone into hydroelectric power: It received
35% of total energy sector investments in
2020, versus 23% for solar and wind. (Over-
all energy investments have gone down in
recent years [see graphic, p. 680].) Spending
is skewed in part because the solar and wind
PHOTO: LUIS TATO/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES industries are mostly private. China’s major
A Belt and Road Initiative project upgraded the port of Mombasa, Kenya, to handle
increasing trade.