Abstract
The detrimental impacts of climate change present a significant barrier to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially for Climate Action (SDGs 13) and climate justice. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) offers potential benefits for climate adaptation in participating countries, but it also poses certain risks. This study aims to assess the impact of BRI participation on climate adaptation across 161 countries from 1995 to 2022. Using a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) approach with two-way fixed effects, the analysis reveals that BRI participation significantly enhances climate adaptation in some countries along the initiative’s routes. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that the BRI has more pronounced positive effects in high- and upper-middle-income countries, Asian nations, and those with higher greenhouse gas emissions. Mechanism analyses suggest that the BRI enhances climate adaptation primarily through improvements in climate readiness, particularly economic and social readiness. The findings highlight the imperative of strengthening absorptive capacity in low-income countries, enabling context-appropriate technology transfer, and deploying targeted financial instruments that directly reward vulnerability reduction, for leveraging the BRI to promote a globally inclusive climate adaptation framework and foster synergies across multiple SDGs.
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Data availability
All underlying data are publicly available from the official sources of the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN), the Belt and Road Database, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI). The study-specific regression datasets constructed for this analysis are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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This work is supported by the Major Project from National Social Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 24&ZD098), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants Nos. 72374107 and 72403129), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grants No. BK20230062), the Jiangsu Social Science Foundation (Grants No. 25EYA001), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grants Nos. 2024M751472 and 2025T180514).
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W.F.: Conceptualization, data curation, validation, formal analysis, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing, funding acquisition. L.F.Q.: Methodology, software, formal analysis, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing. Z.Q.: Methodology, software, writing—original draft. L.J.: Conceptualization, methodology, validation, formal analysis, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing, funding acquisition.
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Wang, F., Liu, F., Zhou, Q. et al. Does the Belt and Road Initiative strengthen climate adaptation in participating countries? Global evidence and heterogeneous effects. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06859-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06859-z
