By Punsarani Jayawardhana
OBOR targets itself to share over 1 trillion USD in economic development across 68 nations. With the realization of a network of roads and maritime routes, to facilitate trade, enhance transport efficiency, and most importantly, to bypass geopolitical deadlocks, OBOR is specifically designed to be eco-friendly and sustainable.
The Chinese government believes that they will promote ecological progress by conducting investment and trade, augmenting cooperation in conserving economic- environment, protecting bio diversity and “joining hands to make the New Silk Route an environmentally friendly one”.
However, with glaciers feeding both China and South Asia drying up, and Tibet being increasingly hotter, and considering the size of the initiative, and its vast coverage of diverse environment and socio-economic and political context, it is a real challenge to turn the Green rhetoric of OBOR into a reality. In South East Asia alone, 23% of the total Chinese funded coal power plan projects are under the OBOR. These plants lock a country into a high emissions energy pathway. This has subsequent economic implications due to grow of the emitting carbon costs.
It is a current need to understand the manner in which the impacts of OBOR interact and aggregate across many spatio-temporal scales, with consequent cumulative results. In general, the environmental impact of the infrastructure projects are measured by assessing their interaction with the receiving environment. OBOR is permeating diverse range of environmental issues, due to its cosmopolitan nature. For instance, the soil and hydrological conditions in OBOR countries interact with other earth systems. The Karakoram Highway, connecting Xingjian to Gwadar port, crosses the Himalayan regions, which are known for very high geodynamic activities. like earthquakes and glacial erosions. Such project clearly have cumulative impacts at multiple temporal and spatial scales.
President Xi Jinping, of whom the OBOR was a brainchild back in 2013, emphasizes that China should ‘pursue the new vision of Green Development and a way of life and work that is green, low-carbon, circular and sustainable’. Thereby he proposed “the establishment of an international coalition for Green development on the OBOR” and he stated that China would be supporting the related nations to adapt to climate change. However, such visionary ideology has been observed much in a skeptical attitude in many studies considering the empirical facts of the participating countries in the OBOR.
For instance, Courtney Weatherby, a Research Analyst for the South Asia Program at the Simson Centre, remarks that major environmental impacts are nevertheless inevitable. In order to mitigate them, it is much needed the adherence to international best practices, including the implementation of high standards for social and environmental impact assessment (EIA), in consultation with the impacted communities.
Nonetheless, China has embodied an “Ecological Civilization” in the OBOR streamlining global cooperation in technology exchange, law enforcement, effective management, green production, free finance and green consumerism. Some Green projects have already started, with the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB), and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), financing a hydropower project in Pakistan in the frame of the China- Pakistan Economic Corridor. Moreover, most of the AIIB Belt and Road projects, across countries like Bangladesh, India and Kazakhstan , involve components of renewable energy or energy efficiency.
But despite the fact that China is projecting itself to ambitious Go Green regarding of OBOR, and that it is committing itself to assist the impacted nations, there are multiplicity of environmental, geographical, economical and even cultural issues that China may encounter. Even if the China’s rhetoric on the OBOR Go Green plan is augmenting both in number and scale, it is necessary to underline that the countries involved in the OBOR initiative vary in a wide range of facets. Most of these nations are developing and are quite in want of technology to diversify themselves from an energy dependent economy with high carbon footprints.
In spite of the diversity of economy and the technology, their particular environmental concerns are almost of polar opposites. For instance landlocked countries like Kazakhstan have a totally different set of environmental and climate change issues from the island nations like Sri Lanka, whose seashore has been quite changed with China aided ‘development’ projects like the Port City Project.
Therefore Xi Jinping’s magniloquence, obout the Go Green plan in the OBOR needs to be supported by proper scientific and economic researches that would pay discrete attention to domestic sensitive intricacies. Without such pragmatic and empirical analysis, it would not be prudent to judge about the ecological civilizational visionary of the OBOR initiative.
However, it is evident that OBOR could impact on the climate, may be even paving the way to novel environmental issues, especially in the ocean. So a real scrutinizing process, about the possible impact on environment, should accompany the projects simultaneously . If not, such gigantic Initiative could worsen environmental problems, especially for poor and developing countries, but also with repercussions across the globe.
(The views expressed in this article belong only to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights)
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