By Desmond Brown
MADRID, Dec 13 2019 (IPS) – Haiti’s Environment Minister Joseph Jouthe has compared the climate emergency to a violent act and appealed to the international community for help to fight climate change.
“Climate change is a very big terror in Haiti. It’s very hard for us to deal with climate change,” Jouthe told IPS on the margins of the United Nations climate summit, the 25th Conference Of The Parties (COP25), in Madrid, Spain.
“Haiti is not responsible for what’s going on with climate change but we are suffering from it. We want better treatment from the international community.”
Jouthe said Haiti remains committed to strengthening its resilience to climate shocks and to contributing to the global effort to mitigate the phenomenon.
Haiti is pursuing a four-fold objective in relation to climate change:
- promoting, at the level of all sectors and other ministries, a climate-smart national development;
- creating a coherent response framework for country directions and actions to address the impacts of climate change;
- promoting education on the environment and climate change as a real strategic lever to promote the emergence of environmental and climatic citizenship; and
- putting in place a reliable measurement, reporting and verification system that can feed into the iterative planning processes of national climate change initiatives.
But Jouthe said the country simply cannot achieve these targets without financial help.
“In Haiti all the indicators are red. We have many projects but as you may know [The Caribbean Community] CARICOM doesn’t have enough funding to build projects,” he said.
Patrice Cineus, a young Haitian living in Quebec, said access to funding has been a perennial problem for Haiti.
