Elamene Valcin struggling after the floods
Haiti: a case study
Climate change is making storms in the Caribbean more intense. And when bad weather strikes, it hits poor people hardest.
Haiti is not only the poorest country in the western hemisphere, it comes below many African countries on the human development index. While conflict-ridden Sudan is rated 142 out of 177, Haiti is 153rd. The Dominican Republic is at 95 on the same league table even though it shares the same land mass as Haiti, occupying the eastern half of Hispaniola.
This extreme poverty makes the Haitian population more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Hurricanes and tropical storms are common throughout the Caribbean, but in Haiti their toll is oftenmuch moresevere.
When tropical storm Jeanne hit Haiti in September 2004, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, even though the winds weren’t even fierce enough to be deemed hurricane force. The same storm hit Jamaica, but caused very few casualties. When rains come in this part of the world, they come hard and fast. The town of Fonds Verettes has been washed away three times in ten years. People continue to rebuild in the riverbed because they have nowhere else to go.
This extreme poverty makes the Haitian population more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Hurricanes and tropical storms are common throughout the Caribbean, but in Haiti their toll is oftenmuch moresevere.
When tropical storm Jeanne hit Haiti in September 2004, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, even though the winds weren’t even fierce enough to be deemed hurricane force. The same storm hit Jamaica, but caused very few casualties. When rains come in this part of the world, they come hard and fast. The town of Fonds Verettes has been washed away three times in ten years. People continue to rebuild in the riverbed because they have nowhere else to go.
Lost livelihoods
Elamene Valcin tends a small plot on the steep slopes of a hillside overlooking a dry riverbed in the Terre Froide region of south-eastern Haiti. Before the floods, the Valcin family had a horse to transport their potatoes, corn, beans and poultry to market. But when the storm came, the horse was killed.
Now Elamene is forced to sell most of her produce in front of her house for less money, and she has lost the income she used to make from renting her horse
Her case exemplifies one aspect of the vicious circle that bedevils the Haitian economy and degrades the country’s environment. When livestock and crops are lost, one of the few reliable sources of income left in Haiti is cutting down trees, manufacturing charcoal and selling it. Like most of their neighbours, Elamene and her family are forced to chop trees between harvests. This has accelerated a process of deforestation that has being going on in Haiti since colonial times. The situation is so extreme that only two per cent of the country’s entire forest cover is left.
Charcoal dependence
The cycle of poverty-related environmental degradation is very difficult to break. The Haitian economy is already heavily dependent on charcoal as a source of energy, and as the poor get poorer, there is little chance of investing in alternatives. Nearly all industrial production, from bakeries to distilleries, relies on woodbased products for fuel.
Altering that dependence would require significant assistance to help households and factories use alternative energy sources. With the landscape deprived of trees and their roots, the recurring hurricanes wash away the country’s rich topsoil into the rivers and oceans – making farming even more difficult. It also makes the terrain more dangerous. The lack of trees and topsoil mean the hillsidescan easily become deadly mudslides.
Not only does poverty greatly magnify the effects of hurricanes, but there is growing conviction that the frequency and severity of storms hitting the region is increasing as a result of climate change. ‘It is clear that hurricanes have been hitting the island more often and with much more force over the past decade,’ says Moïse Jean Paul, the coordinator of the Haitian environment ministry’s climate-change programme.
Another significant problem is the country’s changing rainfall patterns. In Terre Froide, the barren, dusty landscape has seen hardly any rain in several months.
Altering that dependence would require significant assistance to help households and factories use alternative energy sources. With the landscape deprived of trees and their roots, the recurring hurricanes wash away the country’s rich topsoil into the rivers and oceans – making farming even more difficult. It also makes the terrain more dangerous. The lack of trees and topsoil mean the hillsidescan easily become deadly mudslides.
Not only does poverty greatly magnify the effects of hurricanes, but there is growing conviction that the frequency and severity of storms hitting the region is increasing as a result of climate change. ‘It is clear that hurricanes have been hitting the island more often and with much more force over the past decade,’ says Moïse Jean Paul, the coordinator of the Haitian environment ministry’s climate-change programme.
Another significant problem is the country’s changing rainfall patterns. In Terre Froide, the barren, dusty landscape has seen hardly any rain in several months.
The topography looks more like sub-Saharan Africa than the western Caribbean
But at other times, the same landscape sees people’s homes being washed away by floods. In some areas of the country, annual rain levels have risen and in others they have fallen.
In a place where 70 per cent of the population depends directly or indirectly on agriculture, such precipitation changes can be devastating. Irrigation systems are almost nonexistent, so nearly all agriculture is rain fed. Farmers are at the mercy of the elements. If they plant a little too early or too late, they can lose their whole crop.
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In a place where 70 per cent of the population depends directly or indirectly on agriculture, such precipitation changes can be devastating. Irrigation systems are almost nonexistent, so nearly all agriculture is rain fed. Farmers are at the mercy of the elements. If they plant a little too early or too late, they can lose their whole crop.
Join the climate change campaign
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