Improving and "greening" the Belt and Road Initiative

Submitted Assignment from the year 2022 in the subject Geography / Earth Science - Economic Geography, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, language: English, abstract: This short paper looks at the linkage of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) brought forward by the People's Republic of China in 2015. It is an endeavor to expand the country's economic reach and to export goods in wider areas of the world. Hence, it can be seen as a tool to achieve a dominating role in the economic realm, which includes gaining ground particularly in raw-material and technological sectors abroad. Because of several critical remarks by the world community, the PRC has pledged to make the BRi a "greener" project, meaning to invest more in sustainable procedures - such as emission reduction. This, China stresses, should be done to create communities with a shared interest and a common responsibility, automatically evoking thoughts about lowering trade barriers and customs regulations, building strong financial and political institutions, as well as focusing on ecological technologies. Nevertheless, there are still negative effects such as substantial wealth gaps, gender inequalities, and limited economic development capacity along with quite a strong discrepancy between plans and deeds.