Journal Article

Building a green Belt and Road: A systematic review and comparative assessment of the Chinese and English-language literature

Teo, Hoong Chen, Wu, Mingquan, Lechner, Alex Mark, Campos-Arceiz, Ahimsa, Li, Binbin V.

2020

Overview

International attention on the environmental impacts of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is increasing, but little is known internationally about the large corpus of Chinese BRI environmental research. We present the first systematic review of the Chinese and English-language BRI environmental research, supported with text mining and sentiment analysis. We found that the research is dominated by Chinese authors writing about BRI routes within China in Chinese, even though concerns around BRI are largely about impacts and benefits within host countries, and the volume of publications in English is recently catching up. Different disciplines and methods are well-represented across languages, apart from specific types of Chinese social science papers. The sentiments of academic research are largely neutral and less polarised than media discourse. We recommend that scientists and practitioners should pay more attention to BRI environmental impacts in developing countries and proactively engage local voices.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Biology and Life Sciences / Cooperation / Data mining / Developing countries / Dictionaries / Earth Sciences / Ecology and Environmental Sciences / Engineering and Technology / English language / Environmental aspects / Environmental impact / Environmental research / Evaluation / Green belts / Green buildings / Green design / Greenbelts / Infrastructure / Language / LDCs / Media coverage / People and Places / Research and Analysis Methods / Researchers / Sentiment analysis / Social Sciences / Systematic review