Mapping socio-ecological resilience along the seven economic corridors of the Belt and Road Initiative

Highlights

• We mapped and analyzed socio-ecological resilience of BRI economic corridors by river basins.

• 21^st-C Maritime Silk Road (African areas) showed the lowest resilience, mainly due to low AC.

• Bangladesh-India-Myanmar and China-Pakistan corridors also had low resilience.

• The study highlights vast social and ecological differences among the corridors.

Abstract

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive development plan in terms of scale and scope. It aims at facilitating China's connectivity with the rest of the world through trade, investment, and infrastructure projects. BRI encompasses seven economic corridors, which cover over 100 countries. Consequently, the spectrum of their social and ecological conditions is diverse and broad. To date, no systematic BRI scale study exists to assess the ecological challenges of these economic corridors and associate the challenges with the BRI's capacity to cope with them. Thus, it is of profound importance to understand the complex interactions between human (social-economic) and natural (ecological) systems, which are essential to design sustainable development policies in this vast region. This challenging task requires innovative and interdisciplinary research approaches in a policy relevant way. We address this gap by presenting a data-driven geospatial analysis on this complex entity using the Social-Ecological Systems approach. Methodologically, we use resilience analysis, as an equilibrium concept of Ecological Vulnerability (EV) and Adaptive Capacity (AC). A high-resolution geospatial resilience (the ability to withstand and reorganize disruptions when experiencing changes) mapping is made for the river basins along the BRI corridors to identify the drivers of resilience from 1990 to 2015. The results reveal highly diverse patterns of these drivers across the BRI economic corridors. The differences among the corridors grew within the study period. The root cause for the low resilience along the 21st-C Maritime Silk Road (predominantly the African continent) is low adaptive capacity, whereas higher ecological vulnerability is the main reason along the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar, China-Pakistan, China-Central-Asia-West Asia, and China-Indochina Peninsula economic corridors. Further adaptation measures are needed to mitigate the risks related to decreased AC levels and increased EV levels. Investments under the initiative should better combine adequate physical infrastructure with improving institutional (both human talent development and efficient governance) and economic capacities to cope with the existing ecological vulnerability challenges. Finally, this study highlights that over time, AC has shown notable improvements, particularly in Asia, and in contrast to a less volatile EV. The equilibrium analysis between AC and EV offers a valuable resource for policy and decision-makers to plan and manage social-ecological resilience challenges within the seven economic corridors of the BRI, and plan adaptation and mitigation strategies.

Introduction

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), proposed by China's President Xi Jinping in 2013, aims to facilitate connectivity and collaboration between countries along the BRI through infrastructure, trade, and investment activities (NDRC, 2015; OECD, 2018). There is no exact number of countries involved in the BRI as it is just an open platform for interested parties to join. No strategy is internationally available for this initiative. The BRI seeks to expand besides infrastructure projects to include policy synchronization, crediting, financial integration, trade easing, and scientific and cultural interchange (NDRC, 2015). Today, most economical or social collaboration arrangements, plans, or programs between China and other countries are categorized as BRI related activities (Zhang, 2018). This study is motivated by the magnitude of the China's BRI and its relevance as an unprecedented development approach. So far, over one-hundred countries have involved in the initiative by signing cooperation agreements with China (BRIP, 2019), with a total population of roughly an estimated 3.5 billion (Christopher and Zhang, 2018) and nearly 30% of the global GDP (Cuiyun and Chazhong, 2020). The BRI is usually presented as a series of economic corridors that address its connectivity rationale. From 2013 to 2018, the trade volume among the BRI involved countries and regions exceeded US$6 trillion (BRIP, 2019). However, to drive the economies increasing amount of natural and ecological resources are required, and the investment projects under the BRI might put pressure on natural resources, thereby increasing environmental vulnerability. Human activities and natural hazards affect, the ecological environment directly and indirectly (Ippolito et al., 2010; Nguyen and Liou, 2019; Savo et al., 2016). Therefore, understanding the human and social dynamics, quantifying, and mapping the spatial-temporal distribution of environmental vulnerability caused by natural and man-made impacts are needed for environmental protection and restoration (Garnier et al., 2017; Janssen and Ostrom, 2006; Nguyen and Liou, 2019).

China's BRI has become a hot subject for scholars in various fields of studies due to its influential impacts on many countries in terms of economy and environmental concerns. To date, most BRI studies have concentrated on geo-economic and geopolitical consequences as well as environmental concerns. Researchers have considered the countries along BRI from perspectives of trade impacts on resource and environment (Huang, 2019; Tian et al., 2019), energy cooperation (Duan et al., 2018; Qi et al., 2019), carbon emissions (Liu and Hao, 2018; Zhang et al., 2017), environmental degradation (Hafeez et al., 2018), current and possible future impacts on the environment (Ascensão et al., 2018; Simonov, 2018; Teo et al., 2019; Tracy et al., 2017), sustainability issues (Seele and Helbing, 2018), water security of China's BRI regions (Zhang et al., 2019), and agriculture-based virtual water trade (Qian et al., 2019; Y. Zhang et al., 2018), and others.

Looking closer at the environmental risks that the BRI poses, infrastructure development, trade, and investments under the BRI may have immense negative impacts on the environment that may overshadow its economic advantages (Li et al., 2017). The potential environmental consequences of the BRI are multifarious. For example, earlier works have shown that infrastructure projects have direct impacts on ecological systems and biodiversity, but also indirect impacts such as settlement, attracting logging, and poaching (Teo et al., 2019), leading to deforestation and some other land-use change (Losos et al., 2019). The BRI may trigger loss of biodiversity due to habitat degradation and fragmentation (Ascensão et al., 2018; Lechner et al., 2018; WWF, 2017), and increase greenhouse gas emissions due to the building and rehabilitation of transport infrastructures and further investment in coal-fired power stations (Zhang et al., 2017). It can also stimulate the exploitation of natural resources, such as freshwater, construction materials, and various metal ores along the BRI corridors (Howard and Howard, 2016; Hughes, 2019; Suocheng et al., 2017). These study results have certainly provided powerful insights for the policy makers to highlight areas where environmental conservation and management have been beneficial at the BRI scale. But they rarely provided the social-ecological challenges and their co-occurrences within BRI economic corridors.

Besides, embracing the observation, that at the macro level in which the BRI operates, the interactions and the ensemble of numerous environmental issues are in close interaction, and they need to be understood in relation to social and economic conditions, studies approaching such complex interrelations have started to emerge. Yang and Fan (2019) investigated the spatial and temporal energy footprint on the Chinese part of the Silk Road Economic Belt. Saud et al. (2020) extended this topic beyond the energy sector, and to a selection of BRI countries. You et al. (2020) created a socioeconomic development index for 65 BRI countries. Li et al. (2021) analyzed the socio-economic vulnerability of 65 BRI countries to natural hazards.

These studies have been made at the country level, except You et al. (2020), who used fine-resolution gridded data and presented the results by province or state. None of these studies combined the social, economic and environmental systems, although this would be fundamental in addressing the sustainable development questions of this vast region. Neither did they specify the underlying economic corridor logic of the BRI. Therefore, a detailed investigation is needed to properly represent socio-ecological resilience that support the integrity of human (social-economic system) and natural (ecological system), relationships in river basins experiencing environmental, economic and social changes. We propose a gridded indicator-based approach for analyzing the natural and human interactions at the BRI economic corridors scale.

We address these two gaps with the present analysis. By using high-resolution gridded spatial data, we map an overarching set of societal and environmental indicators by altogether 132 countries, which have signed collaborative agreements under the BRI (BRIP, 2019). We do this by seven economic corridors of the BRI, and by using the approach of Varis et al. (2019) for the analysis of socio-ecological resilience through interactions of societal, Adaptive Capacity (AC) factors (governance, economy, human development) with the environmental, Ecological Vulnerability (EV) factors (human footprint, natural hazards, water scarcity). The approach adopts the Social-Ecological Systems method (Berkes and Folke, 1998; Gallopin, 1991; Turner et al., 2003) in a geospatial, quantitative manner, and builds upon the widely used concepts of adaptation, vulnerability, and resilience (Adger, 2006; Gallopín, 2006; Janssen and Ostrom, 2006). In our analysis, the EV is related to the potential of the ecological system to modulate its response to stressors and AC to indicate the capacity of the social system to adjust to potential damages/challenges of the ecological system, whereas resilience indicates the strength of AC in the presence of EV.

The BRI has thus far not been approached as a Social-Ecological System (SES), although recent years have seen a growing trend in implementing such approaches (Gruner and Power, 2017; Guan et al., 2021; Pan et al., 2018; Varis et al., 2019). So far efforts have been made to implement the SES approach in assessing vulnerability of coastal river deltas (Hagenlocher et al., 2018), managing sustainable supply chains to maintain resilient operations (Gruner and Power, 2017), addressing sustainability challenges (Martínez-Fernández et al., 2020) and analyzing ecological pressure and the associated adaptive capacity on global river basins (Varis et al., 2019a). The SES approach has also been used for the analysis of complex systems and sustainability policies (Guan et al., 2021; Mat et al., 2016; Pan et al., 2018, 2019; Yu et al., 2019). It has been implemented for developing strategies to move toward a low-carbon industrial ports areas (Mat et al., 2016), integrating ecological and socio-economic systems to trace carbon flow in a typical wetland city (Guan et al., 2021), and modeling to support climate action planning by considering social and ecological factors (Pan et al., 2019). More recently, the SES approach is proved a suitable approach for analyzing the symbiosis of ecological and social systems in global river basins, where the human population harnesses the natural and ecological resources base in a sustainable way (Varis et al., 2019). Within the process of societal development and progress, there is an essential, active element of strengthening the ability to mitigate and cope better with the changes, not only to adapt to those changes (Lutz and Muttarak, 2017) but also societies need to build their AC adequately in terms of economy, governance, human development as well as in other dimensions needed (Lutz and Muttarak, 2017).

We produce geospatial maps of the AC, EV, and resilience of the BRI corridors, and their evolution from the 1990–2015. This is done by river basins using gridded geospatial datasets for AC indicators (governance, economy, human development), EV indicators (human footprint, natural hazards, water scarcity) and resilience by aggregating into a mesh of river basins, countries and economic corridors in order to maximize relevance to policy making. Our results show that AC substantially changed the critical dimensions of EV between 1990 and 2015, reshuffling AC and EV hotspots and causing a distinct pattern of resilience.

The socio-ecological resilience analysis at the BRI economic corridors level is crucial in three ways. First, it provides a BRI scale overview of the magnitudes and relations of the key factors that have influenced the resilience through developments of AC and EV indices at the economic corridors level. Second, it provides platforms for targeted policy-making activities on BRI economic corridors, which are the most important in terms of their resilience to possibly increased upcoming pressures. Third, trans-national scaling helps to draw regional lessons and strategies to deal with social and environmental impacts of development and investment policies in a macro-level environmental and societal perspective.