China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the largest infrastructure scheme in our lifetime, bringing unprecedented geopolitical and economic shifts far larger than previous rising powers. Concerns about its environmental impacts are legitimate and threaten to thwart China’s ambitions, especially since there is little precedent for analysing and planning for environmental impacts of massive infrastructure development at the scale of BRI. In this paper, we review infrastructure development under BRI to characterise the nature and types of environmental impacts and demonstrate how social, economic and political factors can shape these impacts. We first address the ambiguity around how BRI is defined. Then we describe our interdisciplinary framework for considering the nature of its environmental impacts, showing how impacts interact and aggregate across multiple spatiotemporal scales creating cumulative impacts. We also propose a typology of BRI infrastructure, and describe how economic and socio-political drivers influence BRI infrastructure and the nature of its environmental impacts. Increasingly, environmental policies associated with BRI are being designed and implemented, although there are concerns about how these will translate effectively into practice. Planning and addressing environmental issues associated with the BRI is immensely complex and multi-scaled. Understanding BRI and its environment impacts is the first step for China and countries along the routes to ensure the assumed positive socio-economic impacts associated with BRI are sustainable.

Urban floods are the most severe disaster in most Chinese cities due to rapid urbanisation and climate challenges. Recently, media data analytics has become prominent in enhancing urban flood resilience. In this study, news media data from the GKG of the GDELT project was innovatively used to examine the pattern of news media responses towards urban flooding in China's Sponge City Programme (SCP) pilot cities. We find that public sentiments toward urban flood events have been more positive in SCP pilot cities from 2015 to 2021. News media responses towards urban floods exhibit strong seasonality, which is significantly connected with rainfall patterns. Most of the media articles were posted during the urban flood event. Finally, we suggest the opportunities and challenges in applying GKG data analytics and new technologies for urban flood resilience. The results can provide beneficial references to urban flood management strategies in China's Sponge Cities for associated policymakers and stakeholders.

The "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) was anticipated in 2013 to promote socioeconomic development and cooperation across countries in Asia, Europe, Africa and worldwide. Rapid land-use changes and infrastructure developments driven by the BRI program are expected in the coming decades. These anthropogenic effects are likely to exaggerate the process of de-vegetation, deforestation, accelerating desertification, which is one of the major threats to the BRI region. This manuscript studied the desertification facts (i.e. spatiotemporal pattern, impacts and impacting factors) and investigated key aspects for desertification control (i.e. mitigation and evaluation methods) in the BRI countries via an extensive review of literature. We found that desertification has been prevalent in the BRI countries, predominantly in C Asia, but quantitative assessment of desertification is yet fully understood. This review illustrated that desertification was driven by climatic dryness and mis-land-use/management activities, but their relative importance has yet been (quantitatively) assessed along the BRI countries. Given the negative impacts of desertification, these BRI countries have ratified the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) to reduce negative impacts. The implementation of desertification mitigation programmes are currently still lacking. We argued that desertification is usually evaluated via four type of approaches, including quantitative approaches, indirect detection, direct observation and biophysical measurement (e.g. vegetation growth). Future research should be applied by considering the research scope and data availability. Overall, we conclude that BRI countries should carry out transboundary control on desertification. Otherwise, this issue is likely to extend further imminent developments under the foremost BRI program.