IN BRIEF:

The Paris climate goals require rapid decarbonization of the global power generation sector. To achieve this goal, it is critical to redirect international development finance away from fossil fuel toward renewable energy technologies. We find that East Asian national DFIs have committed to finance a new generation of coal power plants. However, China’s new domestic decarbonization goal, if extended to its overseas finance, will be enormously valuable in reducing future carbon emissions from recipient countries.

SUMMARY:

Global power generation must rapidly decarbonize by mid-century to meet the goal of stabilizing global warming below 2C. To meet this objective, multilateral development banks (MDBs) have gradually reduced fossil fuel and increased renewable energy financing. Meanwhile, globally active national development finance institutions (DFIs) from Japan and South Korea have continued to finance overseas coal plants. Less is known about the increasingly active Chinese DFIs. Here, we construct a new dataset of China’s policy banks’ overseas power generation financing and compare their technology choices and impact on generation capacity with MDBs and Japanese and South Korean DFIs. We find that Chinese DFI power financing since 2000 has dramatically increased, surpassing other East Asian national DFIs and the major MDBs’ collective public sector power financing in 2013. As most Chinese DFI financing is currently in coal, decarbonization of their power investments will be critical in reducing future carbon emissions from recipient countries.