SOURCE: Yale e360
DATE: September 4, 2019
SNIP: China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a multi-trillion-dollar investment strategy aimed at boosting infrastructure development around the globe, will significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and drive global warming past 2 degrees Celsius unless efforts are made to decarbonize the projects being funded, according to a new report by researchers in China, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
The 126 countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative, excluding China, currently account for 28 percent of global emissions. But if development continues as planned, their contributions could jump to 66 percent of global emissions by 2050, the report concluded. This would result in global carbon levels nearly twice what is needed to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius, the upper limit of the Paris Agreement target.