Thoughts on Haiti

Two days ago, just before the earthquake hit, Tyler Cowen blogged encouraging news about Haiti.

In an odd twist of irony, he wrote that the small Caribbean country was experiencing a “renassaince” where economic growth was expected rise by 2.4 percent in the short term.  Earlier in 2009, Haiti’s Central Bank Governor Charles Castel said that this growth would be the result of the millions of dollars in investments in agriculture, roads and bridges after the brutal storms of 2008.  Even the Comfort Inn was planning to open, on Haiti’s coast, to attract tourists.

Just after Cowen posted this news, we learned of Haiti’s 7.0 magnitude earthquake, which leveled much of the country’s capital city and surrounding areas.

This morning, Cowen wrote:

Very rapidly, President Obama needs to come to terms with the idea that the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more.

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There are claims that earthquakes are gaining frequency because of man made climate change.  As one theory goes, global warming is causing glaciers to melt more quickly than ever before, lifting weight off the Earth’s crust, thus causing the newly freed foundation to re-settle.  Similarly, altered atmospheric warming patterns have been blamed for a possible rise in recent hurricane and tornado activity.

I remain unconvinced that natural disasters have been rising in frequency and severity, due to climate change directly (though I do believe there are some indirect consequences).  More than global temperatures, what has changed is where people live, how many of them live there, and under what conditions.

Following the 2005 tsunami disaster, Andrew Revkin wrote:

As new technology allows, or as poverty demands, rich and poor alike have pushed into soggy floodplains or drought-ridden deserts, built on impossibly steep slopes, and created vast, fragile cities along fault lines that tremble with alarming frequency…In that sense, catastrophes are as much the result of human choices as they are of geology or hydrology.

Haiti is located along the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone making it particularly vulnerable to earthquakes (the last major earthquakes on the fault are thought to have occurred in 1860, 1770 and 1761).  And while it is true that this week’s earthquake would have been devastating anywhere, Haiti’s geological vulnerability is compounded by its poor, dense population,  located in resource-scarce regions with unfit infrastructure.

In rich countries, building techniques, data collection, monitoring activity and political systems have improved to deal with inevitable disasters.  But in Haiti, there are no building codes, for starters.  As one example, concrete is often mixed with sand to form inexpensive, but weak structures, unable to withstand much of anything.   The combination of dense, unregulated populations and poverty seen in Haiti is also found in earthquake zones worldwide, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Tehran and Istanbul.

This is not to suggest that man made climate change and the destruction of resources are not some how linked to the occurrence of recent natural disasters (some scientists are warning that Haitians should brace for earthquake induced landslides, brought on by widespread deforestation).  But, rather than emphasize climate change as the culprit it is more useful to concentrate on the “seismic gap” between rich and poor countries and the urgent need for proactive, technological solutions in poor, exposed regions.

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