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Australians need to join the fight against climate change by making simple changes in how they live, the federal government says.
A day after finalising a significant commitment to renewable energy, the government has set its sights on ordinary households, saying they can do more to assist the climate change challenge.
Solar panel rebates of up to $7,000 were passed on Thursday as part of the drive to lower emissions of greenhouse gases.
Environment Minister Peter Garrett on Friday launched initiatives to offer practical tips on how to live a ‘greener’ lifestyle.
The new livinggreener.gov.au website provides a range of information on sustainable living, including composting, how to buy an environmentally friendly oven and the installation of rainwater tanks.
‘Almost 10 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions come from households,’ Mr Garrett said in a statement.
‘But every Australian can make a big difference to the environment and their wallets through simple, cost-effective, everyday actions.’
For a first-hand look at how it can be done, some 170 homes across the country will open their doors as part of Sustainable House Day on September 13.
Environmentally aware householders have been welcoming visitors since 2001, giving them a first-hand look at how homes can be modified, Mr Garrett said.
But the event will be fully sponsored for the first time since 2001, so admission will be free.
Agriculture Minister Tony Burke believes the sugarcane industry will also play a part in achieving the 20 per cent renewable energies target by 2020.
He’s called for greater investment in sugarcane-powered energy, which currently accounts for five per cent of electricity generation in Queensland.
Up to 180,000 homes in the sunshine state and northern NSW could benefit, he said.
On the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of fisheries, destruction of tropical forests, paper consumption, number of motor vehicles, water use, the rate of species extinction and the totality of the human economy’s gross domestic product.
What grips me about these graphs (and graphs don’t usually grip me) is that though they all show very different things, they have an almost identical shape. A line begins on the left of the page, rising gradually as it moves to the right. Then, in the last inch or so – around 1950 – it veers steeply upwards, like a pilot banking after a cliff has suddenly appeared from what he thought was an empty bank of cloud.
The root cause of all these trends is the same: a rapacious human economy bringing the world swiftly to the brink of chaos. We know this; some of us even attempt to stop it happening. Yet all of these trends continue to get rapidly worse, and there is no sign of that changing soon. What these graphs make clear better than anything else is the cold reality: there is a serious crash on the way.
Yet very few of us are prepared to look honestly at the message this reality is screaming at us: that the civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full speed, and it is too late to stop it. Instead, most of us – and I include in this generalisation much of the mainstream environmental movement – are still wedded to a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the present. We still believe in “progress”, as lazily defined by western liberalism. We still believe that we will be able to continue living more or less the same comfortable lives (albeit with more windfarms and better lightbulbs) if we can only embrace “sustainable development” rapidly enough; and that we can then extend it to the extra 3 billion people who will shortly join us on this already gasping planet.
I think this is simply denial. The writing is on the wall for industrial society, and no amount of ethical shopping or determined protesting is going to change that now. Take a civilisation built on the myth of human exceptionalism and a deeply embedded cultural attitude to “nature”; add a blind belief in technological and material progress; then fuel the whole thing with a power source that is discovered to be disastrously destructive only after we have used it to inflate our numbers and appetites beyond the point of no return. What do you get? We are starting to find out.
We need to get real. Climate change is teetering on the point of no return while our leaders bang the drum for more growth. The economic system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for it relies upon that growth to function. And who wants it tamed anyway? Most people in the rich world won’t be giving up their cars or holidays without a fight.
Some people – perhaps you – believe that these things should not be said, even if true, because saying them will deprive people of “hope”, and without hope there will be no chance of “saving the planet”. But false hope is worse than no hope at all. As for saving the planet – what we are really trying to save, as we scrabble around planting turbines on mountains and shouting at ministers, is not the planet but our attachment to the western material culture, which we cannot imagine living without.
The challenge is not how to shore up a crumbling empire with wave machines and global summits, but to start thinking about how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its collapse.
All the best, Paul
Dear Paul
Like you I have become ever gloomier about our chances of avoiding the crash you predict. For the past few years I have been almost professionally optimistic, exhorting people to keep fighting, knowing that to say there is no hope is to make it so. I still have some faith in our ability to make rational decisions based on evidence. But it is waning.
If it has taken governments this long even to start discussing reform of the common fisheries policy – if they refuse even to make contingency plans for peak oil – what hope is there of working towards a steady-state economy, let alone the voluntary economic contraction ultimately required to avoid either the climate crash or the depletion of crucial resources?
The interesting question, and the one that probably divides us, is this: to what extent should we welcome the likely collapse of industrial civilisation? Or more precisely: to what extent do we believe that some good may come of it?
I detect in your writings, and in the conversations we have had, an attraction towards – almost a yearning for – this apocalypse, a sense that you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of a diseased society. If this is your view, I do not share it. I’m sure we can agree that the immediate consequences of collapse would be hideous: the breakdown of the systems that keep most of us alive; mass starvation; war. These alone surely give us sufficient reason to fight on, however faint our chances appear. But even if we were somehow able to put this out of our minds, I believe that what is likely to come out on the other side will be worse than our current settlement.
Here are three observations: 1 Our species (unlike most of its members) is tough and resilient; 2 When civilisations collapse, psychopaths take over; 3 We seldom learn from others’ mistakes.
From the first observation, this follows: even if you are hardened to the fate of humans, you can surely see that our species will not become extinct without causing the extinction of almost all others. However hard we fall, we will recover sufficiently to land another hammer blow on the biosphere. We will continue to do so until there is so little left that even Homo sapiens can no longer survive. This is the ecological destiny of a species possessed of outstanding intelligence, opposable thumbs and an ability to interpret and exploit almost every possible resource – in the absence of political restraint.
From the second and third observations, this follows: instead of gathering as free collectives of happy householders, survivors of this collapse will be subject to the will of people seeking to monopolise remaining resources. This will is likely to be imposed through violence. Political accountability will be a distant memory. The chances of conserving any resource in these circumstances are approximately zero. The human and ecological consequences of the first global collapse are likely to persist for many generations, perhaps for our species’ remaining time on earth. To imagine that good could come of the involuntary failure of industrial civilisation is also to succumb to denial. The answer to your question – what will we learn from this collapse? – is nothing.
This is why, despite everything, I fight on. I am not fighting to sustain economic growth. I am fighting to prevent both initial collapse and the repeated catastrophe that follows. However faint the hopes of engineering a soft landing – an ordered and structured downsizing of the global economy – might be, we must keep this possibility alive. Perhaps we are both in denial: I, because I think the fight is still worth having; you, because you think it isn’t.
With my best wishes, George
Dear George
You say that you detect in my writing a yearning for apocalypse. I detect in yours a paralysing fear.
You have convinced yourself that there are only two possible futures available to humanity. One we might call Liberal Capitalist Democracy 2.0. Clearly your preferred option, this is much like the world we live in now, only with fossil fuels replaced by solar panels; governments and corporations held to account by active citizens; and growth somehow cast aside in favour of a “steady state economy”.
The other we might call McCarthy world, from Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road – which is set in an impossibly hideous post-apocalyptic world, where everything is dead but humans, who are reduced to eating children. Not long ago you suggested in a column that such a future could await us if we didn’t continue “the fight”.
Your letter continues mining this Hobbesian vein. We have to “fight on” because without modern industrial civilisation the psychopaths will take over, and there will be “mass starvation and war”. Leaving aside the fact that psychopaths seem to be running the show already, and millions are suffering today from starvation and war, I think this is a false choice. We both come from a western, Christian culture with a deep apocalyptic tradition. You seem to find it hard to see beyond it. But I am not “yearning” for some archetypal End of Days, because that’s not what we face.
We face what John Michael Greer, in his book of the same name, calls a “long descent”: a series of ongoing crises brought about by the factors I talked of in my first letter that will bring an end to the all-consuming culture we have imposed upon the Earth. I’m sure “some good will come” from this, for that culture is a weapon of planetary mass destruction.
Our civilisation will not survive in anything like its present form, but we can at least aim for a managed retreat to a saner world. Your alternative – to hold on to nurse for fear of finding something worse – is in any case a century too late. When empires begin to fall, they build their own momentum. But what comes next doesn’t have to be McCarthyworld. Fear is a poor guide to the future.
All the best, Paul
Dear Paul
If I have understood you correctly, you are proposing to do nothing to prevent the likely collapse of industrial civilisation. You believe that instead of trying to replace fossil fuels with other energy sources, we should let the system slide. You go on to say that we should not fear this outcome.
How many people do you believe the world could support without either fossil fuels or an equivalent investment in alternative energy? How many would survive without modern industrial civilisation? Two billion? One billion? Under your vision several billion perish. And you tell me we have nothing to fear.
I find it hard to understand how you could be unaffected by this prospect. I accused you of denial before; this looks more like disavowal. I hear a perverse echo in your writing of the philosophies that most offend you: your macho assertion that we have nothing to fear from collapse mirrors the macho assertion that we have nothing to fear from endless growth. Both positions betray a refusal to engage with physical reality.
Your disavowal is informed by a misunderstanding. You maintain that modern industrial civilisation “is a weapon of planetary mass destruction”. Anyone apprised of the palaeolithic massacre of the African and Eurasian megafauna, or the extermination of the great beasts of the Americas, or the massive carbon pulse produced by deforestation in the Neolithic must be able to see that the weapon of planetary mass destruction is not the current culture, but humankind.
You would purge the planet of industrial civilisation, at the cost of billions of lives, only to discover that you have not invoked “a saner world” but just another phase of destruction.
Strange as it seems, a de-fanged, steady-state version of the current settlement might offer the best prospect humankind has ever had of avoiding collapse. For the first time in our history we are well-informed about the extent and causes of our ecological crises, know what should be done to avert them, and have the global means – if only the political will were present – of preventing them. Faced with your alternative – sit back and watch billions die – Liberal Democracy 2.0 looks like a pretty good option.
With my best wishes, George
Dear George
Macho, moi? You’ve been using the word “fight” at a Dick Cheney-like rate. Now my lack of fighting spirit sees me accused of complicity in mass death. This seems a fairly macho accusation.
Perhaps the heart of our disagreement can be found in a single sentence in your last letter: “You are proposing to do nothing to prevent the likely collapse of industrial civilisation.” This invites a question: what do you think I could do? What do you think you can do?
You’ve suggested several times that the hideous death of billions is the only alternative to a retooled status quo. Even if I accepted this loaded claim, which seems designed to make me look like a heartless fascist, it would get us nowhere because a retooled status quo is a fantasy and even you are close to admitting it. Rather than “do nothing” in response, I’d suggest we get some perspective on the root cause of this crisis – not human beings but the cultures within which they operate.
Civilisations live and die by their founding myths. Our myths tell us that humanity is separate from something called “nature”, which is a “resource” for our use. They tell us there are no limits to human abilities, and that technology, science and our ineffable wisdom can fix everything. Above all, they tell us that we are in control. This craving for control underpins your approach. If we can just persaude the politicians to do A, B and C swiftly enough, then we will be saved. But what climate change shows us is that we are not in control, either of the biosphere or of the machine which is destroying it. Accepting that fact is our biggest challenge.
I think our task is to negotiate the coming descent as best we can, while creating new myths that put humanity in its proper place. Recently I co-founded a new initiative, the Dark Mountain Project, which aims to help do that. It won’t save the world, but it might help us think about how to live through a hard century. You’d be welcome to join us.
Very best, Paul
Dear Paul
Yes, the words I use are fierce, but yours are strangely neutral. I note that you have failed to answer my question about how many people the world could support without modern forms of energy and the systems they sustain, but 2 billion is surely the optimistic extreme. You describe this mass cull as “a long descent” or a “retreat to a saner world”. Have you ever considered a job in the Ministry of Defence press office?
I draw the trifling issue of a few billion fatalities to your attention not to make you look like a heartless fascist but because it’s a reality with which you refuse to engage. You don’t see it because to do so would be to accept the need for action. But of course you aren’t doing nothing. You propose to stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, and, er … “get some perspective on the root cause of this crisis”. Fine: we could all do with some perspective. But without action – informed, focused and immediate – the crisis will happen. I agree that the chances of success are small. But they are non-existent if we give up before we have started. You mock this impulse as a “craving for control”. I see it as an attempt at survival.
What could you do? You know the answer as well as I do. Join up, protest, propose, create. It’s messy, endless and uncertain of success. Perhaps you see yourself as above this futility, but it’s all we’ve got and all we’ve ever had. And sometimes it works.
The curious outcome of this debate is that while I began as the optimist and you the pessimist, our roles have reversed. You appear to believe that though it is impossible to tame the global economy, it is possible to change our founding myths, some of which predate industrial civilisation by several thousand years. You also believe that good can come of a collapse that deprives most of the population of its means of survival. This strikes me as something more than optimism: a millenarian fantasy, perhaps, of Redemption after the Fall. Perhaps it is the perfect foil to my apocalyptic vision.
The gap between rich nations and emerging economies over carbon emissions targets is beginning to look unbridgable. From BusinessGreen.com, part of the Guardian Environment Networ
This week, another round of the UN’s climate change talks gets underway in Bonn, Germany and once again all the key factions look as far from reaching a meaningful agreement on carbon emissions targets as they ever were.
It is far too early to give up hope on a deal being reached, particularly given that any exercise in international diplomacy is always characterised by the kind of posturing and brinkmanship we can expect to see again over the next five days. But with just 117 days to go until the start of the Copenhagen conference, major breakthroughs are needed soon if we are to have anything to celebrate this Christmas.
The problem is that all of the key negotiating teams are beginning to sound like broken records as they demand that others move first to deliver targets before they make any commitment.
China, India and the other emerging economies are not unreasonably demanding that rich nations follow the dictats of the latest climate science and agree to cut emissions 40 per cent by 2020 on 1990 levels. But even assuming this is an opening gambit and they might accept the EU’s conditional offer of a 30 per cent cut, they are still asking for reductions that are an order of magnitude larger than the four per cent cut on 1990 levels proffered by the Obama administration as part of its climate change bill – which, by the way, has not yet been passed.
So will the US budge and increase the cuts it is willing to offer? Not a chance.
We can discuss the vagaries of the US electoral system, the malign influence of fossil fuel industry lobbyists and the collective psychosis of parts of the American Right another time, but the facts as they stand are that the Obama administration will count itself very lucky indeed to get the four per cent cut included in the Waxman-Markey bill passed into law.
The US negotiators could have an attack of conscience in Copenhagen and sign up to deeper cuts in order to get India and China on board, but any more demanding targets would soon be shot down in Congress, leaving us exactly where we started.
That puts the ball back in the court of the emerging nations. Will they accept that the Obama administration is offering all it can in the short term and is serious about delivering much deeper cuts of 80 per cent by 2050, leaving them free to sign up to more modest targets for themselves? Again, the answer is not a chance.
You can make a strong case that they are making a rod for their own back, given that the developing world will be on the front line against the impacts of climate change. Just as you can easily dismiss the argument that emerging economies should be allowed to develop using the same carbon-intensive technologies that underpinned growth in the West. As Gaia Vince asked rhetorically in an article for the Guardian today: “The rich south of the USA got to develop its economy with the assistance of slaves. Would it be acceptable for India to use slaves now?”
But it is all but impossible to argue with India and China’s stated position that under any definition of social justice the rich world has a historical debt to pay and must pick up the vast majority of the bill for tackling climate change – and that means agreeing to far more ambitious targets and helping the developing world to decarbonise its growing economies.
As Indian ambassador Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, the senior Indian negotiator, neatly explained to the BBC: “[India] is a country where half the rural population does not have a light bulb in its home, or a gas ring. So to describe this country as a large emitter is absurd – there’s no other word for it.”
Or to quote the somewhat more robust John Prescott in the Guardian: “The fact is that the West has poisoned the world and left continents such as Africa in poverty. The West will have up to stump up the cash for clean technology.”
The way to square this circle is for negotiators to agree to some form of equitable per capita emissions target, and it is this so-called contraction and convergence model that is winning growing support among some of the negotiating teams. But it seems far too late in the day for per capita targets to be included in the Copenhagen process, and even if they were they too would run into the brick wall of a US political system that will not countenance targets that would in effect require deeper emission cuts in the US than anywhere else.
So where does the process go to break this deadlock? I’m not sure it can, at least not on the issue of binding emission targets. It looks increasingly likely that we will see an almighty fudge on the issue of targets built around what is already on the table: namely, largely inadequate targets from rich nations, mirrored by vague aspirational goals to curb emission growth from emerging economies.
However, while a treaty without targets may end up resembling a football match without goal posts, it would not necessarily make the exercise a complete waste of time.
Progress does appear to be being made on the development of a global carbon market, reforestry schemes and clean tech funding for developing nations. Negotiators from the rich world may not be able to see the competitive advantage in signing up to emissions targets that will not be matched by emerging rivals, but they can certainly see the benefits attached to the creation of a major new commodity class in the form of carbon and the strengthening of trade relations with the likes of China and India.
There is a consensus building that clean tech financing pumped into the developing world will help to create new markets for the emerging clean tech hubs of the US and Europe, creating an economic win-win for all involved. Make the grants and financing deals attractive enough and it might even be possible to get emerging economies to budge a little on the issue of targets.
It is likely to be a bit of a mess and it is unlikely to deliver what the scientists demand, but the final Copenhagen deal might just inadvertently deliver what is required. A legislative, financing and carbon pricing framework that makes it both possible and attractive for businesses to develop clean technologies that are better and more cost effective than the carbon intensive rivals they hope to replace. Deliver that and market forces will ensure the decarbonisation of the global economy looks after itself – with or without targets.
Scientists from Canberra’s Australian National University (ANU) and Tianjin University in China have teamed up to develop new cheaper solar technology.
The two year project will pioneer the use of solar cells immersed in cooling fluid to make them more efficient and less expensive than current solar panels.
ANU Professor Andrew Blakers says the new solar systems will be able to simultaneously heat households, water and generate electricity.
“This combines the two functions into a single lightweight, low profile concentrator system,” he said.
“And because you’re utilising the same infrastructure for both electricity and heat collection you can aim to have a substantially reduced cost.”
Mr Blakers says it has the potential to make buildings carbon neutral.
“Inside that receiver immersed in mineral oil is a solar cell that absorbs about 20 per cent of the reflected sunlight to make electricity,” he said.
“The other 80 per cent becomes heat and can be used to make solar hot water and to heat houses in winter and to drive solar cooling in the summer.”
The Senate has passed the Federal Government’s renewable energy target legislation.
The Government split the legislation from its emissions trading scheme and negotiated more industry compensation with the Coalition to secure support for the bill.
Under the new target, 20 per cent of Australia’s electricity will have to be generated from renewable energy sources by 2020.
The Nationals were unsuccessful in their bid to get compensation for food-processing industries and the Greens’ effort to have the target raised to 30 per cent also failed.
Greens Senator Bob Brown says the legislation could have been better.
“It ought to have had better opportunities for regional and rural Australia,” he said.
“It ought not have been a further big handout to the big polluters but it will be.”
Meanwhile, Greens deputy leader Christine Milne says the bill’s passing is a clear sign the Government will be willing to weaken its emissions trading scheme to get it through the Senate.
“Go to the minister with amendments that brown down the scheme, that shore up the Labor vote in their coal electorates, and they go ‘yes’,” she said.
“Take amendments to the minister that actually drive the expansion of renewable energy and the zero-carbon future and it’s all too hard and it can’t be done.”
Assistant Climate Change Minister Greg Combet says the Coalition must now pass the emissions trading scheme.
“It is critical to have the CPRS legislation passed through this Parliament and it is critical for the Coalition to stand up in the national interest,” he said.
Season of dread returns as Haiti awaits devastating hurricane season
Decades of deforestation left the Carribbean island defenceless against last year’s catastrophic hurricanes. But Haiti hopes attempts to save it from the storms will save lives this year
As Haiti enters the hurricane season Suzanne Goldenberg travels to Port-au-Prince and finds that many Haitians are still struggling to cope with last year’s storm damage Link to this video
The flood waters were washing cows out to sea and spitting up boulders as if they were corks. Garvins Novembre realised he and his infant daughter could easily die in their hut on the beach, so as the water poured down from the hills, the fisherman entrusted his life to a boat made from a hollowed-out tree trunk. He set off paddling along what had been – before the storm hit – the main road of the provincial Haitian town of Petite Rivière des Nippes.
He passed submerged shanties, tin roofs invisible beneath the water line, waterborne cars and trucks. Behind him a freshly built church, seemingly sturdy, was left a disembowelled shell, pews and rear wall sucked out by the sea. “It was terrifying. I thought we would die,” Novembre said.
Suzanne Goldenberg reports on how Haiti is unprepared Link to this audio
That was 26 August last year when hurricane Gustav made landfall on Haiti. Barely a week later, Haiti was hit again, by hurricane Hanna, and then hurricane Ike a week after that. Watching the mainstream news during last year’s Atlantic hurricane season, it would be easy to form the impression that Gustav posed most danger to the Louisiana coastline. Certainly memories of hurricane Katrina are still fresh in Louisiana but Caribbean states like Haiti have far less capacity to deal with the storms when they come. By the time the tropical storm season had ended, Haiti – already one of the poorest nations on Earth – was a billion dollars poorer. More than 1,100 people were dead or missing. Thousands had lost their homes, and there were scattered reports of hunger.
Now the season of dread has returned and already tropical depression Ana looks set to make a direct hit on the island tomorrow morning. Novembre is convinced, as are Haiti’s business and government leaders and the international organisations who have helped the country survive, that this season could be the most devastating in living memory.
“Unfortunately I do think that we are going to have a lot of deaths. That is my reading of the situation,” said Ronald Joseph Toussaint, the environment ministry official who drafted the Haitian government’s policy on climate change and natural disaster. A direct hit on the capital Port-au-Prince, where overcrowded slums cling to the slopes above the town, would be pure catastrophe.
He said: “All the conditions are met to have a worst case scenario in Port au Prince in case we have been hit by a hurricane.”
Swazilliya Pierre Louis tells Suzanne Goldenberg how she escaped her flooded house Link to this video
A constellation of factors – crushing poverty and environmental degradation, political instability and bad governance, ill-conceived international aid efforts and sheer geographical bad luck – have crippled Haiti’s ability to withstand and recover from tropical storms. “Haiti is a mosaic of vulnerabilities,” said Toussaint.
Now the prospect of another calamitous storm season has galvanised the international community, with Bill Clinton, who became the United Nations’ envoy to the country in May, joining a new effort to make sure that this year, at least, does not bring Haiti to the tipping point.
There is however a bigger question: does Haiti offer a cautionary tale of what can happen to a country that does not adapt to climate change? The Guardian has made the first of a number of visits to Haiti over the course of this year’s Atlantic storm season to report on the country’s efforts to adapt.
In its updated hurricane forecast earlier this month, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted seven to 11 named storms would rise up out of the Atlantic before the end of November, with three to six developing into full-blown hurricanes.
Haiti could well be on their route; the names of hurricanes past slip easily into conversation here. Jeanne, in 2004, was the deadliest in recent memory, killing more than 3,000. Last year’s quartet – Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike – killed 500 in Gonaives, and caused widespread destruction in Nippes and southern Haiti. For the old timers, there was Flora in 1963, which killed about 5,000 people in Haiti, blowing the roofs off villages and levelling entire banana plantations.
But, the hurricane veterans say, even far lesser storms are bringing huge devastation, with intense flooding and storm surges. For grandmother Swazilliya Pierre Louis, 52, the 2008 storm season destroyed a lifetime of hard work, building up a small business selling snacks to working men in the provincial market town of Miragoâne. When Gustav hit, flooding her tin-roofed wooden shack, Louis had just enough time to grab her purse and her bible. Her savings, which were under the bed, were lost to the rising waters.
She got $125 (£75) in compensation to try to rebuild her life, but it wasn’t enough to rebuild her shack. “This last storm I saw was the worst. Even with Flora, the water wasn’t so high. A child could stand up in it,” she said. “Now I’ve got nothing left. These aren’t my clothes. I even had to borrow bedding.”
The Haitian government readily admits that even middling storms are wreaking widespread and severe destruction. The country’s natural defences are now destroyed. More than 98% of Haiti’s forests have been cut down – mainly by peasants desperate to turn the trees into charcoal they can sell as cooking fuel – leaving barren hills, and soil that is easily washed away. Twenty-five of the 30 water basins, natural systems that once directed rain and flood water safely out to sea, have been clogged or otherwise damaged. The mangroves that once protected coastal areas have vanished.
In Google map images of Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the western, Haitian half is bare.
In truth, the loss was visible long before satellite imagery became widespread. In 1985, the conservationist Jacques Cousteau spent several months off the island on his vessel Calypso, and produced a documentary warning that Haiti was losing a dangerous amount of tree cover. The country’s steep hillsides, which already made farming difficult, were at increased risk of erosion. Debris from successive storms was being washed into the sea, driving the fish further offshore, where Haitian fishermen in their dug-outs struggled to compete against modern trawlers from other countries.
Early efforts to save Haiti’s forests were misguided, or defeated by political turmoil. One scheme by the US Agency for International Development encouraged peasants to grow fast-growing eucalyptus – only to see them swiftly cut down for fuel. Other efforts collapsed in 1990, when the international community blocked fuel and other shipments to Haiti after the overthrow of the elected leader, Father Aristide. More than 40% of forests were lost in that decade alone.
It took until last year for the country’s elite to begin to see a connection between the devastation of the landscape, and natural disaster. “I have to admit that for the majority of the business society, managing water, managing soil, climate change, these are all things that they talk about on CNN and BBC, or that you hear Al Gore going on about,” said Gregory Brandt, a prominent businessman. “It’s not for us. I’d say the majority was aware but not concerned.”
The international community was also slow to grasp the connection, said Anita Swarup, who has worked as a consultant on climate change for Oxfam, Unicef and other organisations. “As far as I can see, little or nothing has been done in terms of dealing with climate change,” she said. “The international community is not sufficiently focused on the impacts of climate change on a poor country like Haiti and considerably more needs to be done.”
Now that reality is inescapable because of the increasing severity and frequency of storms. The Haitian government and the international community are now fully engaged, but those on the front line of efforts to repair the environmental degradation that has left Haiti so exposed to climate change now admit they feel overwhelmed.
In the last few years Oxfam and other international organisations have been working with farmers to build up the hillsides to prevent the massive rush of water towards the sea. Farmers are being encouraged to plant avocado and mango trees, that could help the soil cling to the slopes, and that could bring income over time. They are also being asked to try to shore up ravines with hedges or even sandbags.
But it often feels like too little too late, said Alexandre Pierre Claudel, an agronomist working with Oxfam in Petite Riviere des Nippes. “It’s like we have to keep starting over and over. Nothing lasts for more than a year, and then I am always afraid a hurricane will come,” he said. “The farmers are not ready at all. They are relying on God and praying that nothing will happen.”
A year on from 2008’s hurricane quartet, Haitian government officials have launched an intense push to avoid the worst of the coming season of storms. Town and village councils in the southern Nippes region have drawn up evacuation plans and alarm systems. But most of the town defence teams do not even have radios, let alone cars, to move people to higher ground.
And if they did, the main road to Port-au-Prince remains completely submerged by an inland lake that burst its banks in last year’s flooding. Fisherman now row travellers across the break.
Even in Gonaives – the focus of international relief for Haiti, with visits from Clinton and celebrities including Wyclef Jean – a third of the town remains in ruins. Dozens of people are still living in plastic tents on a scrap of waste-ground on the edge of town. Gary Dupiton, the town engineer, thinks it will take five years to restore the town completely, provided it does not flood again.
Dupiton has spent the last few months overseeing an ambitious project to widen the La Quinte river, the biggest of several that empty at the town, so that it does not burst its banks once again. In Dupiton’s best-case scenario a quarter of the city, Haiti’s third largest, will be flooded in the event of a heavy tropical storm.
And in the worst-case scenario? Duputin does not want to dwell on that prospect. He holds up his hands with fingers crossed. “We are going to have to wait and see,” he said. “Everyone is crossing their fingers and hoping there will be no hurricanes this year.”
Haiti’s hurricanes: Trail of destruction
1963 – Hurricane Flora – Over 8,000 people were killed in the 6th most deadly tropical hurricane in the Atlantic ever.
1994 – Hurricane Gordon – Nearly 1,000 Haitians were buried in mudslides due to widespread deforestation.
1998 – Hurricane Georges – 400 victims and 80% of crops destroyed.
2004 – Hurricane Jeanne – Floods caused by over 13 inches of rain killed over 3,000 people, mainly in the seaside city of Gonaives.
2008 – Hurricanes and storms Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike – 793 people died, 310 went missing and 593 were injured. Nearly 23,000 homes were destroyed. The hurricanes affected 800,000 Haitians, 70% of the country’s crops were wiped out. Damage was estimated at $1bn, 5% of Haiti’s GDP.
Haiti: an ‘ill-fated society‘
It is perhaps a testament to the scale of Haiti’s ecological devastation that the oceanographer, Jacques Cousteau, spent as much time filming on land as on sea during the four months he spent in the country in 1985.
At the time, Haiti had 7% of its forests left – compared with the 80% cover when Christopher Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola in 1492. Great tracts of land were cut down by the French and Spanish colonisers to grow coffee and sugar cane.
An account of Cousteau’s expedition in the October 1985 edition of his Calypso Log fanzine draws the link between the deforestation, declining agricultural yields and dwindling fish stocks. The publication takes its name from the vessel Cousteau used for his expeditions.
“Rainfall has lessened and when rain does fall, it pulls away topsoil, causing severe erosion. Two-thirds of all the country’s watersheds are partially or totally deforested, and if present trends continue, Haiti will have no watersheds at all by the year 2008,” the article says. “All around the island the land has become exhausted.”
An article in the December 1985 edition noted: “Haiti’s own minister of agriculture told Captain Cousteau his country is at a ‘crisis point’, a crisis of environment.”
The conservationist, who travelled the world for more than 60 years, used his visit to Haiti as a primary example of what he called an “ill-fated society” during his speech to the Earth Summit in Rio seven years later in 1992.
Cousteau also used the occasion to vent his less well-known – and by modern standards utterly reprehensible – views on population control for poor countries.
Haiti in numbers
• Population: 9.8 million
• Poorest country in the Western hemisphere. In 2008, GDP per capita was roughly £800 ($1,300), which places Haiti among the world’s 20 poorest nations.
• Nearly 80% of the population lives on less than $2 per day and 56% on less than US$1 per day
• Average life expectancy – men 56, women 59
• Forty percent of Haiti’s schools have no actual buildings
• 25 doctors per 100,000 people
• Infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births – 84
• Economic outlook – Instability and violence, especially since the 1980s, have put the economy into a tailspin. Riots in 2008 were sparked by food price rises.
