China-backed projects in Africa targeted by environmental groups

Uganda and Tanzania last week gave the go-ahead for the construction of an oil pipeline between the two countries, as environmentalists continued to push for it to be scrapped.

State-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp, along with its partner Total, is a major investor in the project and the oilfield it serves.

Green groups, including BankTrack, the Africa Institute for Energy Governance and 350Africa, have said that both the “extraction sites and the pipeline pose environmental and social risks to protected wildlife areas, water sources and communities throughout Uganda and Tanzania”.

The 1,445km (900-mile) pipeline is designed to carry heated crude oil from Hoima in Uganda to the port of Tanga in Tanzania.

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Dozens of China-backed and funded projects in Africa – many of them developed as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative – have faced opposition from communities and environmentalists who accuse their developers of destroying ecosystems in their pursuit of commodities like oil, metals and timber.

In Guinea, China plans to invest in a massive deposit of high-grade iron ore in the Simandou mountains. The project would help Beijing to reduce its dependence on Australian imports amid tensions with Canberra but its opponents say it will also destroy livelihoods.

In Ghana, a US$2 billion bauxite-for-infrastructure deal with Chinese state-owned firm Sinohydro Corp has drawn fire for the threat it poses to the environment and people.

Elizabeth Losos, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute in the United States, said some China-funded projects in Africa had done enormous damage to communities and the environment. “The real tragedy is that in many of these cases early consultation and planning could have avoided these disasters,” she said.

For instance, the Ghana-Sinohydro deal was agreed without conducting a sector-wide assessment to determine how much bauxite could be mined without polluting drinking water, damaging farmers’ livelihoods or threatening natural treasures, Losos said.

“Once word got out what was happening, protests erupted. Sinohydro’s reputation has been damaged within Ghana and across the globe,” she said.

Similarly, “work on the SMB [Simandou] mining project [in Guinea] and the associated railroad has already begun before a proper environmental assessment has taken place”, she said.

Several China-backed projects in Africa have been blocked as a result of pressure from environmental groups.

In 2019, a court in Kenya ordered a halt to the construction of a US$2 billion coal-fired power plant in Lamu after activists argued it would endanger a Unesco World Heritage Site. Industrial Commercial Bank of China, which was providing US$1.2 billion of the funds, subsequently pulled out of the deal.

Yun Sun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Centre in Washington, said that both investors and host nations were to blame for the lack of proper oversight and concern for the environment.

“There is no doubt that Chinese commercial actors … have tried to evade the environmental requirements,” she said.

But in many cases, investors were only taking advantage of weak governance systems, so host countries should also be held partly responsible, she said.

Nor was the problem confined to Chinese firms, Sun said. American and European companies are increasingly facing pressure from regulators, investors and the public to address environmental and human rights concerns throughout their supply chains.

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Despite the concerns about Chinese investors, Jackson Ewing, also a senior fellow at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute, said Beijing was not unaware of the potential risks involved with private and state-owned firms operating in belt and road countries.

“Reducing these risks requires more uniformly applied standards and practices on environmental and social issues by China’s outbound actors, which is likely to come only via coherent policy requirements from the top down,” he said.

Christoph Nedopil Wang, the founding director of the Green Belt and Road Initiative Centre, said that some Chinese financial institutions were trying to improve their environmental risk management beyond the requirements of host countries.

Also, Chinese regulators were starting to apply “green” concepts, such as the so-called traffic light system that was proposed in December and provides a framework for classifying Belt and Road Initiative projects based on their environmental impact, he said.

Losos said the traffic light system was a step in the right direction in helping Chinese companies to avoid some of the most damaging projects.

“But there is still a long way to go for this certification system to become adopted in a useful way,” she said.