Green finance on the Belt and Road – with Christoph Nedopil-Wang

Environment China

In this episode, we discuss the important topic of green finance in China, especially as it relates to China’s investments abroad on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Our guest today is Christoph Nedopil-Wang, Associate Professor and Director of the Green Finance & Development Center, Fudan University, where he works on green finance. Christoph also previous worked in Beijing at the International Institute of Green Finance (IIGF), as well as at GIZ. He also joined us here at Environment China in December 2020 to introduce the traffic light system of evaluating BRI projects.

One of the reasons we’re coming together to talk today is the recent publication of an article in the Asia Pacific Policy Studies journal, which Christoph wrote together with Mathias Lund-Larson, Mengdi Yue and Yao Wang. You can find a link to the article in the show notes, but the full title is “Prospects of the Multilateral Cooperation Center for Development Finance (MCDF) to catalyse infrastructure financing.”

Other topics we discuss are:

• whether the traffic light system for evaluating BRI project impacts on the environment has had any impact,
• why China decided tProspects of the Multilateral Cooperation Center for Development Finance (MCDF) to catalyse infrastructure financingo ban financing for new coal plants overseas,
• whether the recent policy to make BRI projects apply international ESG standards is having an effect, and why it was adopted now, instead of earlier,
• and whether the MCDF is really resulting in actual benefits in terms of project preparation.

Other links:

Christoph Nedopil, et al., "Prospects of the Multilateral Cooperation Center for Development Finance (MCDF) to catalyse infrastructure financing," Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies, 27 April 2022, at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/app5.345.