This seminar is hosted by the Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests

Summary: Along the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic there have been recent efforts, primarily led by the Dominican government, to reforest this area. A reforestation project was launched in two watersheds on the Haitian side of the border, funded by the Norwegian government and implemented by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The design of this reforestation effort involved hiring local teams of reforestation brigades and landowners volunteering their land for trees to be planted. Unfortunately, these two groups often overlapped.

This presentation will briefly present results of a one-month field campaign that collected over 200 household surveys from 20 communities within these two watersheds. Data collected includes incidence of food, water and fuel insecurity, main sources of income (particularly charcoal production), various wealth measures (e.g. livestock, land and assets owned), border conflicts and major household concerns. In addition to the socio-economic surveys, GPS points of all households were taken and their distribution analyzed with land cover maps generated from three Landsat 5 mosaics from 1986, 2001 and 2010.

This research is intending to look at the dynamic between the above listed household characteristics and localized environmental degradation, such as deforestation.

Speaker: Alexandra Morel, PhD, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Earth Institute, University of Columbia