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Later this month, China will mark the 10th anniversary of the “belt and road initiative” (BRI), its global infrastructure project, at a major international conference in Beijing.
The summit, set to be attended by more than 110 countries, according to Chinese state media, will include “green development” as the focus of one of three high-level forums.
Yet the BRI has faced significant criticism in its first decade for supporting the development of overseas fossil-fuel infrastructure, particularly coal-fired power stations.
Although Chinese president Xi Jinping has pledged to end support for overseas coal power – and his country has signalled an intention to pivot its infrastructure initiative towards “high quality”, signifying, among other values, low-carbon development – questions remain over the BRI’s direction in its second decade.
Carbon Brief has asked leading experts what impact the BRI might have on climate action in the years ahead.
Energy projects and the BRI
The BRI is a global infrastructure project that aims to develop trade routes between China and the rest of the world. It has been criticised for supporting development of overseas fossil fuel infrastructure, particularly coal-fired power.
China’s role in constructing BRI projects largely takes the form of Chinese commercial involvement in project development or loans provided by Chinese financial institutions.
China’s policy banks have reduced their lending, with financing now provided by a broader range of actors, from the state-owned Bank of China to HSBC.
China rarely owns the assets it develops, with Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port being a well-known exception.
Energy and transport infrastructure are the most common types of BRI project. In 2023 to date, for example, energy projects made up 36% of BRI investment, while transport projects accounted for 28%, according to the Green Finance and Development Center (GFDC).
GFDC found that cumulative investment across projects in all sectors exceeded $1tn as of August 2023, according to its analysis of data compiled by the Chinese ministry of commerce, the American Enterprise Institute and by GFDC itself.
The Council for Foreign Relations found that “between 2014 and 2017, 91% of energy-sector loans made by six major Chinese banks to BRI countries were for fossil-fuel projects”.
From 2017, however, the Chinese government began encouraging the “greening” of the BRI. Then, in 2021, president Xi Jinping pledged that China “would not build new coal-fired power projects abroad”.
Recent BRI projects developed with the aim of reducing carbon emissions include Indonesia’s “Whoosh” high-speed railway, the Noor Abu Dhabi solar plant in the United Arab Emirates and Sri Lanka’s Colombo International Container Terminal (see more below).
Researchers also found that, in line with Xi’s pledge, “no new investments in coal power plants have been recorded under the BRI”, China Dialogue reports, although “loopholes” have allowed some coal projects to proceed.
Below, Carbon Brief asks four leading experts the same question: China has stated an intention to pivot the BRI towards low-carbon energy development. How do you think the BRI could affect climate action over the next decade?
Their responses have been edited for clarity and length.
Prof Kevin P Gallagher, director of the Boston University Global Development Policy Center:
As the BRI moves into its second decade, China can solidify its pivot toward low-carbon development in the global south. According to our research at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center, in the early stages of the BRI the majority of China’s overseas energy finance was…in fossil fuels in general and coal-fired power plants in particular.
Emissions from the operating Chinese-financed power plants around the world now emit upwards of 245m tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, roughly the energy-related CO2 emissions from the entire country of Spain or Thailand annually.
In 2021, China announced it would not build new coal-fired power projects abroad and to step up support for low-carbon development. Moving forward, China could pledge to ramp up overseas financing for low carbon development and adopt a green project pipeline facility to ensure alignment with these directives.
Prof Lin Boqiang, dean of the China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy, Xiamen University:
In some countries along the “belt and road”, despite the rapid growth of energy demand, the development of green energy is limited due to their relatively backward economic and technological level and the lack of advanced clean-energy technology and facilities. Through the construction of renewable energy projects, such as wind and solar power, China can provide technical, financial and experience support to host countries to promote the development and upgrading of their renewable energy industries.
By providing more clean-energy supplies to these countries…China helps them reduce their dependence on traditional energy sources and promotes energy transformation and green development. At the same time, some countries along the belt and road have problems such as unstable energy supply, energy poverty and low energy efficiency…Cooperation to develop renewable energy projects…will help these countries improve their energy security and promote sustainable development along the belt and road.
Yasiru Ranaraja, founding director of the Belt and Road Initiative Sri Lanka (BRISL):
China’s commitment to shift the BRI towards low-carbon energy development has significant implications for climate action in the coming decade. When we delve into the context of global climate efforts, we encounter a historical divide between developed and developing nations regarding climate justice and the debate over the common but differentiated responsibilities principle in climate action.
While all parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) acknowledge the importance of addressing climate change, the approach to climate action varies among member states. Many developing nations prioritise economic growth, poverty reduction, climate mitigation, and energy security over stringent top-down climate regulations.
China, through the BRI, has emerged as a crucial player in advocating a three-phase approach to low-carbon development: funding, construction and operation. Under the BRI umbrella, numerous infrastructure projects…are dedicated to green development…For example, in Sri Lanka, the Colombo International Container Terminal (CICT), which is an investment development project under BRI, has embraced green technology since its inception in 2014.
This terminal has witnessed a remarkable increase in cargo volumes over the years while prioritising environmental sustainability. The shift to electric cranes has resulted in a 45% reduction in CO2 emissions and a 95% decrease in diesel consumption…Additionally, more than 80% of the terminal’s electricity comes from solar technology. The terminal’s success story…exemplifies how commercial prosperity and environmental protection can coexist harmoniously.
Prof Christoph Nedopil Wang, director of the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University:
China controls almost all parts of the green-energy supply chain – from critical minerals for batteries to wafer production for solar, from manufacturing wind turbines to the necessary financing. Without China’s cooperation, a green-energy transition is hardly achievable – whether in the BRI or beyond…BRI countries, meanwhile, must improve their energy planning, energy policy and power markets to be able to attract sufficient Chinese investments in green energy. This should include a phase-down of fossil subsidies and better utilisation of blended finance to reduce financing cost for green energies, as well as longer-term green energy PPAs (power purchase agreements).
A big question remains on the accelerated phase-down of Chinese sponsored coal-fired power plants and replacement with green energy. A recent study by the Green Finance & Development Center and Climate Smart Ventures shows significant financial benefits for Chinese sponsors of plants in Vietnam and Pakistan when accelerating retirement and replacement.
The post Experts: How will the next decade of China’s ‘belt and road initiative’ impact climate action? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Experts: How will the next decade of China’s ‘belt and road initiative’ impact climate action?
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change finds that the growth in solar, wind and electric vehicles (EVs) now offsets around two-thirds of the emissions that would otherwise come from rising energy demand.
However, the deployment of these technologies is not yet enough to push global emissions into a sustained decline, according to the study.
The 2026 global carbon budget report also estimates that:
- Fossil emissions are projected to fall in China (-0.9%), the US (-1.3%) and the EU (-1.5%) in 2026, but rise by 4.4% in India.
- Oil emissions are projected to fall in every major region, with the largest drop in China (-4.6%).
- Land-use emissions averaged 4.9GtCO2 per year over 2016-25, around 21% lower than the decade before.
- Total CO2 emissions (fossil and land-use) grew by an average 0.3% per year over the past decade (2016-25), compared with 1.7% per year over the decade before.
- The remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C is 150GtCO2, or less than four years of current emissions.
- The land sink in 2025 was the highest on record, rebounding after being weakened during the 2023-24 El Niño. The current El Niño is expected to weaken the land sink in 2027.
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is set to reach 427.7 parts per million (ppm) in 2026, 54% above pre-industrial levels.
(For more on previous editions of the Global Carbon Project’s annual report, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2022.)
Total emissions edge up as land-use emissions rise
Total global CO2 emissions, which combines fossil fuels and land-use change, are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026, up from 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
The increase in 2026 comes entirely from a projected rise in land-use emissions, which are more challenging to estimate than fossil emissions.
(The global carbon budget groups emissions from fossil fuels and cement production as “fossil emissions”. Carbon Brief follows this convention throughout this piece.)
If land-use emissions had stayed at 2025 levels, total emissions would have fallen slightly in 2026 to around 42.6GtCO2.
Each edition of the global carbon budget updates the historical record as new data and methods become available. The chart below shows total emissions in this year’s budget compared with the five previous editions.