A Greener Path

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By Dennis Normile, Science Magazine. 

Excerpt: China is making its Belt and Road Initiative more environmentally friendly. The massive infrastructure program could still cause ecological devastation. ...The 40 wind turbines dotting the rolling grassland 9 kilometers south of Zhanatas, an impoverished industrial town in southern Kazakhstan, are monuments to change. ...the $160 million Zhanatas Wind Farm has a capacity of 100 megawatts (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 carbon 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 reason as well: It is one of the biggest renewable 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 economic 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 Pandora’s box of environmental crises, including large-scale deforestation, habitat fragmentation, wildlife poaching, water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions,” ecologist William Laurance of James Cook University, Cairns, wrote in The Conversation in 2017.…

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