Boston University Global Development Policy Center

In recent years, China has grown to be one of the largest providers of outward power development globally through its growing global shares of foreign direct investment (FDI) and development bank finance. Until Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s announcement that China “will not build new coal-fired power plants abroad” in September 2021, China was also one of the few countries that would still support overseas construction of coal-fired power plants. In a new study, Ian Kieffer (with Cecilia Han Springer and Ian Sue Wing) use a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium model to assess the potential impact of Xi’s proclamation on global CO2 emissions. The study creates a simulation of a 2030 global economy in which China has replaced predicted coal projects with solar- and wind-based projects across both International Energy Agency and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) development scenarios and analyzes the impacts of such a change in investment strategy in terms of effects on emissions, economic structure and gross domestic product.

On Wednesday, March 16, join Ian Kieffer, Global China Research Fellow with the Boston University Global Development Policy Center and Ian Sue Wing, Professor with the Department of Earth and the Environment at Boston University, for a discussion on China’s clean energy transition abroad. This webinar is part of the Spring 2022 Global China Research Colloquium.