Africa Defense Forum
Jingjing Zhang is a lawyer and environmental activist who has fought Chinese companies that pollute for decades. Her work has brought her to many countries, where she says her native China is using a hazardous development model: Pollute now, get rich and attempt to clean up later.
In May, she visited Zambia to advise villagers whose lives were devastated when a toxic waste spill from a Chinese copper mine caused one of the country’s worst ecological disasters.
“Companies have a field day when they come here,” Andrew Kombe, a Zambian lawyer who is representing villagers, told Zhang, according to Inside Climate News. “They can do whatever they want.”
Amid widespread uproar in Africa over countries struggling to repay Chinese debt, a troubling pattern has emerged in the background of the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI): Chinese mining and construction companies on the continent are leaving a trail of environmental devastation.
Luwi Nguluka, director of communications for the Wildlife Crime Prevention organization in Zambia, said the two issues are intertwined. In her country, China holds 82 loans — more than any other country in Africa — totaling $9.5 billion.
“The government’s close relationship and financial dependence on China poses challenges to holding Chinese-owned mining companies fully accountable,” she told ADF, explaining that cleaning up and restoring the environment around the Sino-Metals Leach Zambia spill could take many years. “Lax oversight and regulation have been long-standing issues in Zambia’s mining sector.”
Kenya is another cautionary example of huge BRI loans giving Chinese infrastructure companies outsized influence that can harm natural resources.
Chinese banks and companies financed and built the Standard Gauge Railway, which sparked controversy for bisecting Nairobi National Park and crossing the Tsavo conservation area, which supports about 40% of Kenya’s elephant population.
The railway has fragmented habitats, disturbed migration routes and altered wildlife behavior. Mitigation measures like wildlife underpasses were included, but studies showed that they have been only partially effective, with elephants and other animals still struggling to cross safely.
“Linear infrastructure projects like the railway must develop sustainable and ecologically sensitive measures,” the late Tobias Nyumba, then a researcher with the University of Nairobi wrote for the Conversation. “For example, underpasses must be at the right density and of the right size. At present, the underpasses are few and are located in areas not used regularly by wildlife.”
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