Xi Jinping often talks about the “green” BRI as a part of his vision for China's ecological civilization, which was outlined in the 2019 BRI Belt and Road Forum. In the words of the person tasked with instrumentalizing this vision, it establishes “a green consensus with BRI participating countries, strengthens cooperation on global biodiversity conservation, and moves together towards the 2050 vision of ‘Living in Harmony with Nature’ and pursues the goals of the UN's Agenda for Sustainable Development” (Xi 2019). Indeed, much of the discussion on “BRI 2.0” is centred around China's new commitments to sustainability (Ang 2019).

The BRI has so far created a small network of environmental initiatives: the BRI Green Development Coalition, the BRI Environmental Big Data Platform and the Green Silk Road Envoys Program that provides training for participating government officials. At the same time though, the BRI – a massive infrastructural initiative geared towards energy and transport sectors – is going to affect ecosystems from China to Chile. China's domestic environmental record is improving of late but only after decades of an outright war on nature in the pursuit of development (Watts 2010). This raises concerns about the capacity of various green “bolt- ons” to mitigate the sheer destructive power of rapid industrial development. The argument is convincing: if China failed to protect its own environment, why would Chinese companies be more environmentally minded elsewhere, especially in countries with weak regulatory systems (which abound on the Belt and Road)?

In some ways, this argument is unfair to China. Historically, economic development brought about environmental destruction, followed only later by the willingness and ability to repair some of the damage – a pattern known as the “environmental Kuznets curve” (named so after the more famous Kuznets curve correlating inequality and development). Following this line of reasoning, if the BRI brings about economic development in the “dirty” sectors of energy and transport, some envir-onmental degradation is expected and would have happened anyway. We could also add that China's development was partly facilitated by the displacement of polluting industries from more developed econ-omies, so it is not surprising that the West's dirty hand- me- downs are now being passed on to a new group of developers willing to trade the environment for industrial development.