Current Watershed Investments: Typology and Characterisation

Before a national watershed policy can be written, someone has to say what is already being funded and in what form, and that is this paper's job at the June 2010 colloquium. It classifies and characterizes the investments then in progress across Haitian watersheds. Its introduction states the problem those investments address as a linked chain rather than a list: advanced degradation of the environment and natural resources, expressed in soil erosion, accelerated loss of biodiversity and the growing scarcity of readily usable water, and issuing in vulnerability to natural disasters. That chain is the reason watershed condition belongs in a territorial-planning discussion at all, because its last link is the flood that arrives in a downstream town. Alongside the intervention history and the PDNA-based environmental assessment from the same session, it supplies the stocktake half of the policy exercise.