A true climate leader would invest in the preservation of areas of global ecological importance rather than destroy them. Yet China, which is trying to portray itself as an environmental leader, is one of the biggest investors in fossil fuels and other harmful projects wreaking havoc on the Amazon and its indigenous peoples. So we're calling on it to match its rhetoric to its actions.

Last week, the New York Times published an op-ed entitled "China's Other Big Export: Pollution" written by Amazon Watch and Paulina Garzon of the Bank Information Center. The editorial details how billions in Chinese loan commitments to Latin America and the Caribbean have gone mainly to projects with significant destructive environmental effects like oil drilling, coal mining, hydroelectric dam construction and road building. The editorial was published just a week after we accompanied our ally, Sápara leader Gloria Ushigua, to the Chinese consulate in San Francisco to demand an end to oil drilling on Sápara territory.

As we argue in the New York Times, China has a great opportunity to chart a new path: to heavily invest in clean, renewable energy projects and abandon its investment in fossil fuels, a losing proposition in the face of plummeting oil prices, increasing competition from renewables, and the scientific imperative to leave 80 percent of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground to avoid a catastrophic two-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures.

We hope you will read and share our editorial. Let's continue to step up the pressure on China to protect, not destroy, the Amazon rainforest.

Leila Salazar-López
Executive Director