Estimating the Costs of Climate Change Impacts in Haiti
Summary: A September 2015 estimate of what climate change costs Haiti, produced under the project to strengthen the adaptive capacity of Haiti's coastal communities. Written by a Carbonium team with staff of the Ministry of Economy and Finance.
Key Findings
- Estimates the cost of inaction by 2025 at between 15.7 million US dollars a year for the main agricultural products and 170 million for the sector, so the range itself is the finding.
- Sets two headline magnitudes against each other at about 1.8 billion US dollars and 261 million, the comparison the report uses to argue for acting.
- Frames the stake through agriculture's weight: 28 percent of GDP and a fifth of employment, which is why a climate cost lands on the economy rather than only on the environment.
- Situates Haiti among the poorest countries on the planet with close to 60 percent of the population affected.
- Produced under the project to strengthen the adaptive capacity of Haiti's coastal communities, dated September 2015.
Full Description
Costing climate impacts is what turns adaptation from an environmental question into a fiscal one, and the involvement of MEF staff as co-authors is the point of interest here: the numbers were produced with the ministry that would have to budget for them. It predates the 2022 National Adaptation Plan and its financing strategy, both of which are in the corpus, and reads as the analytical groundwork for them.
How to cite
Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF); United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2015, Estimating the Costs of Climate Change Impacts in Haiti, https://www.undp.org/fr/haiti/publications/estimation-des-couts-des-impacts-du-changement-climatique-en-haiti