Green Antilles

The president of Haiti has announced the launch of a programme to household solar energy to some of the most remote parts of the country:

Haiti’s president said Monday he hopes to double the number of rural households that receive electricity within two years by offering people small loans to buy solar kits.

The announcement by President Michel Martelly is part of a $45 million-plus energy package that aims to introduce electricity to thousands of people in this impoverished nation who otherwise illuminate their homes by candlelight.

The program, dubbed “Give me light, give me life,” seeks to build credit for rural Haitians as they take out loans to purchase small solar kits for charging their cell phones or computers.

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The 40-year-old state-run Electricity of Haiti can only power 200,000 homes, Martelly said, and only 30 percent of the population in this country of 10 million has access to a power supply. Even then, most parts of Haiti only have electricity for a few hours a day, forcing many businesses and some homes to rely on generators and expensive fuel imports.

The new program will call on smaller Haitian banks to issue $30 million in loans with an interest rate of 7 percent, payable over seven years. The credit will help families purchase solar kits that will each cost between $250 and $350.

The families in question live in two of the most remote corners of the country — the Grand-Anse, the mountainous tip of the western peninsula, and the Northwest province.

In the end, the program seeks to give a power supply to 200,000 households within two years before moving onto the rest of Haiti, Martelly said.

Read more in the full article from the Washington Post.

In Haiti, conservation scientists have discovered a new breeding site for the rare Black-capped petrel (also known as the Diablotin):

A new nesting location for the globally threatened Black-capped Petrel has been discovered in Haiti by conservationists.

The extremely rare petrel has a total population estimated at 1,000 breeding pairs, although records at sea suggest that more than 5,000 individuals may persist. The only breeding sites presently known are at Loma del Toro in the south-west of the Dominican Republic and at La Visite and Macaya in southern Haiti. The species has been wiped out at some sites and it is anticipated that both the breeding range and population will continue to decline as a result of ongoing habitat loss and degradation, hunting and invasive predators.

Concern over the status of this seabird was discussed during an International Workshop of the Black-capped Petrel Working Group held in Santo Domingo during November 2010. The need to undertake surveys of potential nesting sites was one of a number of clear actions identified during the planning workshop, and in order to facilitate the search for nests, a map of potential breeding habitat was produced by John Gerwin of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science.

Using the map to target efforts, Grupo Jaragua (BirdLife in the Dominican Republic) searched for Black-capped Petrel nests early in 2011. The surveys were a natural extension of the support provided to James Goetz (The Cornell Lab of Ornithology) and his efforts to promote national and international collaboration for the species over the last few years.

The presumed breeding season of the Black-capped Petrel was already underway when the Grupo Jaragua team started their expedition to search for nests on 3 March. After reaching the small, rural Haitian community of Savann Zombi by vehicle, the expedition continued on foot along the Massif de la Selle in order to reach a site close to Morne Vincent, one of the sites pinpointed by John Gerwin as a possible nesting location. Morne Vincent is a steep hill with cliffs, forming part of the mountain chain of the Massif de la Selle, and surrounded by land heavily impacted by slash-and-burn agriculture. On arrival at the site day-time searches for nests were initiated, followed by efforts to locate calling birds at night. After two days of intensive day and night efforts, no sign of the species had been discovered.

Not wanting to admit defeat, Jairo Isaa Arache – a field assistant trained by Grupo Jaragua in the use of camera traps and telemetry – decided to search an adjacent, as yet un-surveyed, hill on his own. From somewhere up on the hill, the team heard Jairo shout “I think I have found the bird!” Inside a small cave, an adult Black-capped Petrel was sitting motionless on a nest of dry pine needles and fern leaves. Nothing seemed to disturb the bird, and each team member took turns to have a short look at this miraculous find. The first ever active nest of a Black-capped petrel had been discovered!

To learn more read the full article from Birdwatch (found via Repeating Islands).

Information about the Black-capped petrel (Pterodroma hasitata) and its conservation status is available from BirdLife International and ARKive.

Previously on Green Antilles Birding expedition in Jamaica finds hope for petrels.

[Photo: Patrick Coin]

These videos are especially striking in light of recent news that human-caused environmental degradation may have contributed to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

The major environmental problem facing Haiti’s biodiversity is explained, including video of tree-cutting within a national park.

The nearly complete deforestation of Haiti has caused countless problems for the country, the people, and its biodiversity. One such problem is examined here: the effect on stream flow. It is shown that many floods and droughts in Haiti are caused by deforestation, because forests help retain rain water.

Writing for the Mother Nature Network, Bryan Nelson discusses how environmental damage and climate change could have contributed to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti:

If you ever doubted that human action was capable of profoundly effecting the Earth’s ecology, consider this: Scientists now believe that our mismanagement of the environment is quite literally causing the Earth to shake.

New research has confirmed a correlative link between the occurrence of major earthquake events, such as the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and rapid soil erosion caused by deforestation and man-made climate change, reports the Independent.

The idea that the weather plays a role in triggering earthquakes is highly controversial, and scientists have largely discounted previous attempts to establish a link between earthquakes and changes in atmospheric pressure, such as what happens during typhoons and hurricanes. But a new study, recently presented at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, takes a different angle. It looks at how changes to the weight of soil bearing down on faultlines might serve to release geological stress.

“Very wet rain events are the trigger. The heavy rain induces thousands of landslides and severe erosion, which removes ground material from the Earth’s surface, releasing the stress and encouraging movement along faults,” said Shimon Wdowinski of the University of Miami in Florida.

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti serves as a particularly telling example, since Haiti sits right along the path of frequent hurricanes in the Caribbean Sea. The nation also suffers from extreme deforestation, which is also a leading cause of soil erosion.

“The 2010 earthquake in Haiti occurred… 18 months after the same area was hit by two tropical storms and two hurricanes,” said Wdowinski.

Read more in Nelson’s full article Could the earthquake in Haiti have been a man-made disaster? and, from the UK’s Independent newspaper, Why the Haiti earthquake may not have been a natural disaster .

[Photo: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies]

[This video is part of a series that] examines remote, poorly known, and largely unexplored regions of Haiti to survey their biodiversity, in a country where almost no forests are left. In this first installment, a large and virtually unknown mountain range, the Chaîne de la Grande Colline, is revealed. A team made up of biologists, photographers, a film-maker, and a journalist, explore the Grande Colline in a helicopter expedition.

Previously on Green Antilles: MacArthur Foundation funds conservation work in Haiti, Protecting ecosystems and economies in Haiti and Rediscovering Haiti’s frog.

National Geographic reports on a project in Haiti that’s converting human waste into fertilizer:

A new type of public toilet is helping people in Haiti make fertilizer from human waste, a project that may someday revive the country’s degraded farmland, curb disease, and create jobs.

Since 2006 the U.S. nonprofit Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL) has been installing public toilets in Haiti, where 80 percent of the population has no access to sanitation.

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Sanitation was the most successful health intervention in the modern world,” said SOIL co-founder and soil ecologist Sasha Kramer. But in Haiti, “poop getting into water is the leading cause of death.”

So far, SOIL has installed ecological toilets in camps of more than 20,000 people left homeless by the 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince. Facilities are also being supplied to 30 communities in northern Haiti. (See “Haiti Earthquake Anniversary: Pictures Show Slow Recovery.”)

But these aren’t just any toilets: Kramer and her colleagues constructed urine-diverting toilets, a type of ecological sanitation in which urine and feces are separated. The waste is then covered with a dry material to aid decomposition and is regularly collected.

“With seven billion people on the planet as of this week,” Kramer said, “technologies like this are more and more important for addressing the basic rights of a growing population and reducing the negative impact on the earth’s ecological systems.”

From Waste to Valuable Soil

Once a week SOIL workers drive through communities in a flatbed truck called the Poopmobile, collecting the toilet drums and replacing them with clean ones

The waste is then taken to a composting site outside the city, where workers mix the material with sugarcane bagas—a byproduct of making rum—to speed up the composting cycle.

“All the microbes get excited, they start reproducing like crazy,” said Kramer, who’s also an emerging explorer with the National Geographic Society. (The Society owns National Geographic News.)

The activity heats the compost to about 160 degrees Fahrenheit (71 degrees Celsius). This kills any disease-causing bacteria, which are adapted to the average human body temperature of 98 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius).

Workers check the compost temperature every two days, and “by the end of eight months, [we] end up with incredibly nutrient-rich soil,” Kramer said. Human waste may even be better than cow feces for compost, she added, since our meatier diets contain more plant-boosting nitrogen.

When composted properly to kill pathogens, human waste is a “very rich nutrient source that’s quite suitable for growing crops for human consumption,” said Serita Frey, a soil microbial ecologist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

“In the West, we’re quite squeamish about use of human waste in general as a fertilizer,” Frey said, but “throughout history it’s been used in Asia and other parts of the world as a soil amendment.”

Adding compost to farmland can also improve soil structure and stability, both crucial for preventing erosion, added Frey, who is not affiliated with SOIL.

That’s because, as bacteria and fungi decompose the material, they produce sticky glues that bind soil particles together to form stable clumps, she said.

Toilet Project a “Very Good Circle”

So far, the Haitian toilet project has yielded more than 100,000 gallons (400,000 liters) of compost, some of which is already being applied to experimental gardens and crops, Kramer said.

Some of these gardens are producing vegetables that provide food for residents in Cité Soleil, an extremely poor, densely populated area near Port-au-Prince, said Daniel Tillias, a Haitian community organizer for the peace group Pax Christi Haiti.

The rich compost could eventually be used to grow crops and replant trees across the impoverished Caribbean country, where decades of land overuse and deforestation have stripped soils of nutrients and led to widespread erosion.

Read more in the full article Human Waste to Revive Haitian Farmland? at the National Geography website. (Found via Repeating Islands.) See also: the SOIL website.

[Photo: Sasha Kramer, SOIL, via news.nationalgeographic.com]