HolaDR.com: Everything About The Dominican Republic!

As hurricane season gets underway, Haiti is again in the news. Massive environmental degradation and rising hurricane intensity mean that the country’s 10 million residents are at risk with each tropical storm. Due to deforestation, the rambling and once arbitrary border between Haiti and Dominican Republic has become a geographical one that can be seen from space. Less than 2% of Haiti has forest cover. Can you tell where the border is in the NASA photo? The lack of forest cover sends rain water and top soil pouring out of the hills and through the coastal towns.

Deforestation has occurred for a variety of reasons, including overpopulation, poor land management, corruption, extreme poverty, and a lack of alternatives to charcoal for fuel. Charcoal is a terrible fuel source: it’s inefficient and dirty to make, and unhealthy to use, especially indoors. But in the poorest areas of the world, it’s often the only game in town.

A blog isn’t the right place for giving justice to the complex social-political-environmental history of Haiti, but the pattern of environmental degradation from profit-motivated opportunism to economic necessity to ecological and humanitarian disaster is a cautionary tale playing out in other areas of the world as well. As cap and trade and other emissions reduction ideas are debated here inthe US, economic necessity is often used to justify resistance. It would serve us well to look at what lies beyond this argument before giving in so easily.

It also underscores the economic necessity that is driving much of the irreversible ecological damage in the first place. Simply supporting economic and environmentally sound alternatives where locals are otherwise be forced to make bad choices may be the best way to avoid more Haitis, and a warming planet. In Brazil, for example a project ClimatePath supports funds replacement of native wood fuel sources with cleaner and renewable biomass, to preserve the Cerrado.

As the climate debate and discussion about the climate-poverty connection grows louder, you’ll be hearing more about projects like this, and efficient cookstoves, and even small scale solar installations, or in Haiti’s case, possibly even paying to replant forests. In a country like Haiti, where over half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, we can make a very real difference.
Read more: global warming