Denuded hillsides in rural Haiti (Photo: Scott MacKenzie)

The long road to recovery is under way in Haiti, but it will be an arduous and difficult journey. Beyond the devastation wrought by the earthquake, the country will have to continue to deal with many of the ills that plagued it prior. It is well known by now that Haiti had (and continues to have) the highest poverty levels in the western hemisphere. The nation severely lacks even the most basic infrastructure and services from health care, waste management, to property rights and land tenure. These troubles have been compounded over the last two and a half months.

Almost immediately following the earthquake, indeed within 48 hours, a team from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) began an assessment process to identify key areas of environmental vulnerability. These issues range from chemical spills to erosion and flooding vulnerability, and are crucial elements in re-stabilizing the country. Since the earthquake essentially knocked out UNEP’s main counterpart in the country, the Ministry of Environment, the responsibilities for addressing acute, response, and early recovery issues will in large part rest on the capabilities and offerings of the international community.

On January 21, UNEP released its first assessment of the environmental health, safety, and vulnerability of the areas affected by the earthquake (you can view UNEP’s Rapid Environmental Assessment by clicking here). These assessments provide the initial blueprint for aid agencies attempting to prioritize their fund-raising and donor activities to match the needs. Often with environmental interventions, they are embedded into broader “cluster” areas such as shelter, water and sanitation, agriculture, and so forth. Thus far, this would also appear to be the strategy in Haiti (to learn more about UNEP’s activities in Haiti, visit here).

There are a number of horrific priorities, including the decay of bodies and the accumulation of debris and hazardous wastes, both from the damage wrought by the earthquake and the response effort. Looking toward the long-term stabilization of the country, the displacement of people away from Port-au-Prince back toward rural areas will be an important focus area. This shift is unsettling due to the already heavily degraded and over-taxed condition of Haiti’s natural resource base, and its people’s dependence on charcoal (watch a video on the Haiti Regeneration Initiative).

Charcoal Production (Photo: Scott MacKenzie)

Prior to the earthquake, Haiti’s tree cover had been reduced to roughly 2% due to countless years of felling trees without also regenerating the areas from which they had been extracted. These trees are used for everything from creating charcoal fuel, to building materials, to simply clearing a space for agriculture. Over time, Haiti’s topsoil has been significantly reduced through erosion and seasonal rains that essentially wash the denuded landscape out to sea. Without the trees, the stability and resilience of the soil is degraded, crop yields drop, and poverty escalates. Considering that the majority of the people of Haiti are essentially living on sustenance, stemming the tide of deforestation has been incredibly difficult.

The devastation wrought by this tragic earthquake presents few areas for optimism, but it does present opportunities to tackle some of the more systemic issues that Haiti has faced for decades upon decades. Moving away from charcoal production and consumption is one of those crucial areas. As people continue to stream into rural areas and subsequently search for fuel options, they will undoubtedly fall back upon charcoal to meet their needs. The international community and donors responding to the country’s overwhelming cries for assistance should mobilize as rapidly as possible to meet these basic needs with alternatives that don’t strip the land of a future that is already being washed to sea each time it rains.

For more information on charcoal alternatives, watch this video from TED with Amy Smith.

A video from the Earth Institute discussing ecological restoration efforts in Haiti, and how the work has adjusted to new realities on the ground as a result of the January 12, 2010 earthquake.

A Future for Haiti: Science and Solutions for a Beleaguered Nation from Earth Institute on Vimeo.

Project Groundswell is proud to announce the launch of the 100 Beds for Haiti Campaign. 

Tomorrow will mark the two-month anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti that killed hundreds of thousands of people – leaving far more injured and homeless. In the wake of the tragedy, we have been working with a group of friends and colleagues to help establish a project that addresses both the immediate needs of Haitians as well as the long-term recovery of the nation itself.

100 Beds for Haiti is partnering with the largest and best hospital in Haiti, Hôpital Sacré Coeur (HSC), to raise the financial and material resources to get 100 hospital beds where they are desperately needed.  Currently, HSC has 73 inpatient beds with over 300 patients to treat, with more patients arriving each day. Additional beds are crucial to the recovery of the population and the expanding needs of the hospital. As emergency relief efforts and global consciousness of the disaster dwindle, we must work hard to keep the vast needs of Haiti’s long-term recovery and sustainable development on people’s minds.

Today, we are asking all of you to join this campaign and to support the recovery of Haiti by improving the health of Haitians at Hôpital Sacré Coeur, and we are inviting you to join us.

Please take a moment and visit the 100 Beds for Haiti website to learn more about the effort, who is involved and who we’re working with. Join the campaign by donating today, following it on twitter, becoming a friend on facebook, and reading about the fundraising and advocacy events and activities on the 100 Beds for Haiti blog. Join the list-serve and share your input and insights on how to make the campaign’s goals materialize.

Moving forward, the campaign would appreciate your feedback, ideas, and support. One of the biggest goals with this campaign is to foster continued awareness and attention to Haiti’s recovery efforts, and ideas and partners are needed to make this happen.

Please 

join us to support long-term health solutions that meet immediate needs, helping Haiti heal, one bed at a time! Help bring 100 Beds to Haiti!

When I was younger I remember feeling the Loma Prieta quake while at an after-school program, and then upon returning home, heading next door to see my neighbor’s swimming pool still thrashing about. It was a peculiar sight.

(Photo: Creative Corps / Flickr)

That sense of peculiarity has returned to me these last couple months. First the earthquake in Haiti occurring a little less than a year after I was in the country assisting with a post disaster environmental assessment. And now the earthquake in Chile. Concepcion, Chile, the second largest city in the country that has sustained some of the most horrific damage, was my home for the better part of five months a number of years ago. The epicenter of the quake itself was disturbingly close to a remote stretch of coastline where my friends and I would retreat to camp and surf.

Both of these earthquakes are reminders that Earth is not a static place, but a changing and at times violent one. Some of those changes are gradual, and other times, as we have observed, they are sudden and severe. Both Haiti and Chile offer two examples of the latter case.

Chile and Haiti are two very different places. Chile is one of the most prosperous countries in South America, and Haiti, the poorest in the western hemisphere. Chile has a civil and social infrastructure and a strong government. Haiti’s government has been plagued by corruption, a lack of resources, and depends heavily on foreign assistance. However, if there are some lessons to be drawn from these events, we would be wise to take note.

One of the main lessons and distinctions I see between these two events has to do with building codes in each country. It is not the earthquake per se that leads to the most deaths, but the response of our built environment to these events that seals our fate. Or as a professor of mine once said, “earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.” The magnitude of the quake certainly determines the destructive potential, but aside from landslides and tsunamis, if you take buildings out of the equation, there would be relatively few deaths resulting from earthquakes. More often than not, poverty determines the readiness of the built environment.

Cinder block housing in Haiti

There are no building codes in Haiti, and the overwhelming majority of buildings, both commercial and residential, were built with stacked cinderblocks, cheap cement, poor support beams, and even sticks as side pillars – if they were even present at all (see a photo album on building practices in Port-au-Princes). Many buildings were stacked upon each other in this fashion, which is why so many of the buildings in Port-au-Prince essentially pancaked upon each other. Throw high density into the mix, and the death toll skyrockets.

Chile, on the other hand, does have building codes and even many of the more inexpensive dwellings are built to minimum structural standards so they are quake resistant. While many of the buildings in Chile have been very heavily damaged, they have not pancaked or collapsed to the same degree as they did in Haiti, and those structural requirements are likely a big reason for that. The significantly lower death tolls in Chile are no doubt a result of this as well.

Given how many cities across the world are vulnerable to earthquakes, it might be a good idea to at the very least make sure we are building to code, and not cutting corners with the materials we use. In areas where people are left with no choice but to do so anyway, as was the case in Haiti, we must ask ourselves whether we would rather help transform the building sector in these parts of the world, or bear witness to more tragedies like we have seen these past two months.

For more information:

Listen here for an analysis from the USGS: Lessons from Chile: Preparation is Key.

Andrew Revkin from the New York Times wrote a really good piece about the risk that cities around the world face from earthquakes, and his timing was eerily spot on.

And check out this graphic showing the distribution of earthquakes across the planet.

Earthquake distribution across the planet

The recent earthquake in Haiti has highlighted a whole host of issues related to development, poverty, the environment, and security. Countries in which natural resources are mismanaged, degraded, or heavily exploited are more susceptible to the devastation brought on by environmental change, and when extreme events and conflicts do occur, these countries are far less likely to effectively respond to the crisis.

Even before the earthquake in Haiti, decades and indeed centuries of deforestation left the country with declining agricultural yields, heavy erosion, and few natural buffers to limit the possibility of landslides, flooding, and subsequent structural failures during the onslaught of seasonal tropical storms and hurricanes. The destruction brought about during the recent earthquake and the 2008 hurricane season illustrated this fact in painfully clear terms.

In this regard, Haiti is not unlike a great deal of other countries in the developing world. While it is an extreme case, it is not a unique one, and increasingly the security community is drawing the linkages between the role natural resources, and now climate change, play in fueling instability and even worse, armed conflict.

The United Nations Environment Programme has a Post Conflict and Disaster Management branch dedicated to this focus, and in recent years has launched efforts to draw focus to the role of illegal trade in timber, minerals, and other high value resources, amongst a host of other environmental drivers, in fueling conflict. The branch has begun the long process of bringing attention to these factors, and ensuring that they are an integral part of the recovery and reconstruction process.

(Watch this short video from the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program featuring David Jensen, policy manager at UNEP’s Post Conflict and Disaster Management Branch.)

In the case of natural disasters, as has been seen in Haiti and in a plethora of other cases such as the Indian Ocean Tsunami in late December 2004, degraded ecosystems clearly play an important role in intensifying human vulnerability. As with deforestation in Haiti, areas where mangrove forests had been removed along the coast near Aceh in Indonesia and elsewhere were most badly damaged by the ocean’s violent surge. Unsurprisingly, these areas also tend to be where humans are most settled.

The upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review from the Department of Defense is also taking these factors, and the role that climate change may play in accelerating them, very seriously (see a new working paper from CNAS on the DOD’s Quadrennial Defense Review). As natural systems around the world stand to be even further disrupted, many of the countries that are already vulnerable to internal unrest and extremist insurgencies struggling for power and control could well face a threat multiplier from climate change, as their resource base becomes increasingly unstable, populations begin to migrate, and tensions over scarce (or increasingly valuable) resources multiply.

How the security community, and the U.S. military and international peacekeepers, responds to these challenges is yet to be fully determined (see Dot Earth’s post on the U.S. military response in Haiti). It is a safe guess, however, that we will likely see more and more missions similar to the U.S. military’s response in Haiti.

The following short video from worldfocus was published in February, 2009, but is as relevant today as ever. Prioritizing ecological restoration and supporting environmentally sound infrastructure and development projects will be critical if the country’s long term recovery efforts are to reduce vulnerability to natural disasters such as the earthquake on January 12, 2009, or the hurricanes and tropical storms of August-September 2008.

This week, we wanted to focus the gRound-up on the earthquake disaster in Haiti, highlighting some articles that discuss the underlying environmental issues there.

Deforestation in Haiti
This video report by the New York Times shows how the cycle of deforestation and poverty is perpetuated Haiti.

How to rebuild Haiti
Jeffery Sachs, director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, writes in the Washington Post on how basic infrastructure can be rebuilt and livelihoods can improve as quickly as possible.

The US military’s role in enhancing security
Andy Revkin writes about how the US military put its military might and logistical experience to good use during disaster recovery situations. Not only can it save lives, but it can help foster goodwill in places where the US might not be the most popular.

How much of the devastation could have been avoided in Haiti
An article in Newsweek cites a geophysicist at Columbia University, who talks about how information identifying high risk areas is not translated into policies and action that could lessen the impact of disasters. An earthquake was even predicted for the region just a few years ago.

The following photos were taken during a March 2009 field assignment in Haiti. The purpose of that trip was to conduct a post-disaster environmental needs assessment following the 2008 hurricane season. This gallery offers some images of what Port-au-Prince looked like at that time, and provides a visual context for the sort of building construction and materials that made the city so vulnerable to the January 12 earthquake. It also offers a brief look at some of the environmental challenges facing Haiti. Now more than ever, Haiti will need help to reverse many of these trends as it starts the long process of rebuilding. It will be one of the most significant environmental recovery efforts ever launched.

See also:

Port-au-Prince, Haiti: An Environmental Catastrophe

A view of the dwellings that fill the hills surrounding Port-au-Prince (Scott MacKenzie, March 2009)

At 4:53 p.m on January 12th a 7.0-magnitude earthquake centered just 10 miles west of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince violently shook and toppled an already dire situation there. Reports coming out of Port-au-Prince are that the city has been largely destroyed. Hospitals, schools, government buildings, UN’s MINUSTAH headquarters, and homes have all collapsed. Building debris and fallen electrical lines block roadways, and relief supplies have yet to reach the roughly 3 million people who are estimated to be affected. Tens of thousands are feared dead, and more are likely missing. Aftershocks have continued to rock the city and dampened hopes as the great many who are now without shelter and basic supplies such as food, water, and medicine face further challenges.

Roughly 3300 miles from the destruction, the tremors of what has happened shake me, and I can only imagine the scale of what has occurred. As I struggle to find the best way to contribute to the relief and recovery, and to help ensure the safety of friends and colleagues of mine who experienced these horrific events in Port-au-Prince, perhaps it is wise that I share with you some of my thoughts and experiences, and hopefully offer some insight into what has happened. As I learn more, I will do my best to add and refine information.

Extreme Environmental Vulnerability
I visited Haiti in March of 2009 as part of a team that was conducting an environmental needs assessment following the devastation brought on by the prior 2008 hurricane season. In August and September of 2008, a combination of hurricanes and tropical storms battered the country in rapid succession, knocking out infrastructure, flooding low-lying areas, and decimating economic livelihoods. Hundreds were killed, millions were temporarily displaced, some permanently. In many ways the country is still recovering from those storms; it was poorly prepared for another horrific event of this nature, particularly an earthquake the likes of which have not been felt on the island in over 200 years.

Photo: Scott MacKenzie, March 2009

Haiti is particularly vulnerable to extreme events such as these – in many ways it is a case study in environmental mismanagement and vulnerability. Perhaps most notable is the deforestation that has reduced tree cover on the Haitian side of Hispaniola (Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic to the east) to some 2% of its original reach. The lack of forested areas exposes the country’s steep hills to severe erosion, and over time this has removed a tremendous amount of topsoil. The loss increases the likelihood of flooding and landslides across the country. Access to clean water and basic sanitation are largely absent in many areas, and waste – much of it human and animal excrement – pollutes much of the water supplies that are available. What doesn’t pollute merely piles up, with waste amassing in street, alleys, and waterways from the capital to the most rural areas.

There is no one reason for Haiti’s squalor, but there is some explanation found in the country’s poor institutional capacity and beleaguered history. Haiti’s fragile government and weak civil infrastructure has been plagued by decades of mismanagement, political and economic corruption, violence, rampant environmental degradation, social upheaval, and neglect. It is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, with over 80% of the population living on $2 a day or less, and depends heavily on remittances from expat members of the Haitian Diaspora to provide economic livelihood.

Port-au-Prince, January 13, 2009 / Photo: Eduardo Munoz, Reuters (via NYT)

Perspective on a Disaster
As our team drove through the winding roads of Port-au-Prince, I was struck by both the sheerness of the hills upon which thousands of dwellings had been constructed, and the shoddiness of their making. Construction is constant all over the country, but it is often incomplete, and generally in areas that are vulnerable to extreme environmental events like hurricanes and earthquakes. This is most evident in the slums that lie below the hilly areas of pocketed affluence in the capital city.

At that time, it was difficult to imagine many of these structures withstanding one hundred mile an hour plus winds and the deluge of storm run-off from a hurricane. The impacts of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake can be nothing short of complete catastrophe.

The work needed to get the country back on its feet will be extraordinary. Given the circumstances prior to the quake, Haiti will have a steep climb ahead. One can only hope that it offers an opportunity for more sustainable development moving forward.

Photo: Scott MacKenzie, March 2009

“Truly Horrific”
Two of my colleagues from that field trip are currently trapped in the capital of Port-au-Prince. Their hotel collapsed in the quake, but they were luckily able to get themselves to the UNDP headquarters a short distance away – the very same headquarters where we received our security briefing and clearance before heading out to the countryside to conduct our assessment last spring. I was able to reach them online today; their brief description of the destruction is truly horrific.

They are safe, although they are without medical and relief supplies, and are using what they do have to treat people in between the aftershocks. People have arrived at the gates to the fenced in facilities seeking assistance. An eerie silence lingers across the city, and as time advances, the scale of what has unfolded becomes apparent. It is a desperate situation. They are now faced with the difficult decision of whether to evacuate, or stay and assist in the emergency relief efforts.

Assist
At this time, the most important thing that any of us can do is to stay informed and offer our assistance in whatever capacity we can – whether that is through donations or  volunteer efforts.

The Clinton Foundation has a page set-up for donations:

Donate to the Clinton Foundation

Yele Haiti is Wyclef Jean’s organization:

Donate to Yele Haiti for earthquake relief

Editors Note: these are not the results of the Project Groundswell Photo Contest – there is still time to vote for your favorite photo!

The UNFCCC/CDM International Photo and Video Contest announced its winners last week, and we thought it would be fun to share them with you.

1st Place: Yang Li & Xiaochen Zhan | Title: CDM Changes Nasong’s Life

2nd Place: Sandeep Damre | Title: Circle of Light

3rd Place: Van Yang | Title: Changing Lives in China