The Chinese Development Bank and the China Export-Import Bank provided more than $141 billion in loan commitments to Latin America and the Caribbean from 2005 to 2016, far surpassing lending from multilateral banks to the region. These loans have gone mainly to projects with significant environmental effects like oil drilling, coal mining, hydroelectric dam construction and road building. Over half of all public-sector lending from China to Latin America, some $17.2 billion in 2017, went to the fossil-fuel industry.

Image Yasuni National Park and Biosphere Reserve in Ecuador’s Amazonian region. Nearly all of Ecuador’s oil reserves are in the Amazon rain forest. Credit... Dolores Ochoa/Associated Press

Chinese direct investment in Latin America follows a similar pattern: $113.6 billion was invested from 2001 to 2016, about 65 percent of which went to commodity-oriented transactions.

Many of the extraction projects are in areas, like the Amazon rain forest, that must be preserved for combating climate change. The Amazon is the world’s largest terrestrial carbon sink and plays a critical role in regulating the global climate. Expanding fossil-fuel production in this region results in more emissions and deforestation.

Chinese money is fueling the growth of fossil-fuel industries in places like the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve in the Ecuadorean Amazon, believed to be the most biodiverse place in the world and the home to indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation. Some of the $17.4 billion in financing provided by China to Ecuador since 2010 has gone to oil-for-loan deals, meaning they must be paid through the sale of oil or fuel — and nearly all of Ecuador’s reserves are in the Amazon rain forest. Meanwhile, Chinese investment in genuine sustainable-energy projects in Ecuador is scant.

In the Brazilian Amazon, China has committed significant funding, through development financing and direct investment by state-run companies, for the Brazilian government’s efforts to construct a new commodities corridor through the Amazon basin, facilitating the expansion of industrial agribusiness into remote, pristine rain forest.