Hurricane Matthew: Territorial Damage and Orientations for Reconstruction

Hurricane Matthew crossed Haiti's southern peninsula on the night of 3-4 October 2016 and caused considerable damage. This CIAT report, version 2 of January 2017, was written explicitly in parallel with the material damage assessments then under way, and that distinction is its point: a damage assessment counts what was destroyed, whereas this asks what the storm revealed about how the territory is organized, and therefore what reconstruction should change rather than restore. For an institution whose mandate is territorial planning, the reconstruction question after a disaster is the planning question in its most consequential form, because it is the one moment when the settlement pattern, the road network and the exposure of built areas are genuinely open to revision and money exists to act on the answer. The report covers the affected departments of the Grand Sud across 48 pages.