A total of 60 fragments from five species of corals have been placed on the trees in the coral nursery. Credit: Andrew Ross

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Jul 13 2015 (IPS)

With time running out for Jamaica’s coral reefs, local marine scientists are taking things into their own hands, rebuilding the island’s reefs and coastal defences one tiny fragment at a time – a step authorities say is critical to the country’s climate change and disaster mitigation plans.

Five years ago, local hoteliers turned to experimental coral gardening in a desperate bid to improve their diving attractions, protect their properties from frequent storms surges and arrest beach erosion.“The fishermen have done a beautiful job of keeping the corals alive and the fish sanctuary successful." -- Andrew Ross

In 2014, their efforts were boosted when the Centre for Marine Science (CMS) at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona scored a 350,000-dollar grant from the International Development Bank (IDB) for the Coral Reef Restoration Project.

Project director and coastal ecologist Dale Webber told IPS that his team will carry out genetic research, attempt to crack the secrets of coral spawning and re-grow coral at several locations across the island and at the centre’s Discovery Bay site. The project will also share the research findings with other islands as well as another IDB project, Belize’s Fragments of Hope.

The reefs of Discovery Bay have been studied for more than 40 years, and are the centre of reef research in Jamaica. It is also home to several species of both fast and slow growing corals that Webber says are particularly resilient.

“They have tolerated disease, global warming, sea level rise, bleaching, etc. – all man and the environment have thrown at them – and are still flourishing. So they have naturally selected based on their resilience,” he explains.

A total of 60 fragments from five species of corals have been placed on the trees in the coral nursery. The five species are Orbicella annularis; Orbicella faveolata; Siderastrea siderea; Acropora palmata and Undaria agaricites. These fragments are being monitored as they grow and will be planted on the reefs.

Jamaica’s reefs – which make up more than 50 per cent of the 1022 kilometres of coastline, have over the years been battered by pollution, overfishing and improper development.  Finally in 1980 Hurricane Allen smashed them.

Many hoped the reefs would regenerate, but sluggish growth caused by, among other things, frequent severe weather events and an increase in bleaching incidences due to climatic changes sent stakeholders searching for options.

A massive Caribbean-wide bleaching event in 2005 resulted in widespread coral death and focussed attention on continuing sand loss at some of the island’s most valuable beaches. But aside from the devastation caused by the hurricane, scientists say the poor condition of the reefs are also the result of a die-off of the sea urchin population in 1982 and the continued capture of juvenile reef fish and the parrot.

Predictions are that the region could lose all its coral in 20 years. Some reports say that only about eight per cent of Jamaican corals are alive. However, new surveys conducted by the UWI at several sites across the island show coral cover of between 12 and 20 per cent.

Along Jamaica’s north coast from Oracabessa in St. Mary to Montego Bay, coral recovery projects have yielded varying levels of success. The Golden Eye Beach Club, the Oracabessa Fish Sanctuary and Montego Bay Marine Park are among those that have experimented with coral gardening.

The process is tedious, as divers must tend the nurseries/gardens, removing algae from the fragments of corals as they grow. The pieces are then fixed to the reefs. The results are encouraging and many see this is an expensive but sure way to repopulate dying reefs. A combination of techniques, management measures and regeneration have boosted coral cover at Discovery Bay from five percent to 14 per cent in recent years.

“We hope to supplement this and get it growing faster,” Webber who also heads UWI’s Centre for Marine Sciences says.

At the Centre’s newest Alligator Head location in the east of the island, the aim is to increase the coral cover from the existing 40 per cent. The nurseries have also been set up at the site in Portland to compare the differences in growth rate between sites.

At the NGO-operated Montego Bay Marine Park, where an artificial reef and coral nursery was established in the fish sanctuary, outreach officer Joshua Bailey reports:  “There have been moderate successes. New corals are spawning and attracting fish.”

He cautioned that the impact of “urban stressors” on the park and in surrounding communities – high human population density  and high levels of run-off – makes it difficult to judge the success of the restoration.

One of the most recent projects proposed the construction of an artificial reef off the shore of Sandals Resorts International Negril, as one of many solutions to reduce beach erosion along the famous ‘Seven Mile’ stretch of the Negril coast. The National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) approved the construction of an artificial reef in 1.2 metres of water offshore the Resort’s Negril bay property.

Andrew Ross is responsible for the Sandals and several other projects. A marine biologist and head of Seascape Caribbean, he explains that the Negril project lasted one year. It allowed for the study of fast and slow growing coral species and included the construction of a wave attenuation structure to determine how wave action influences sand accumulation. The coral nursery and the structures were populated with soft corals, sponges and a variety of other corals from the area.

In Oracabessa, a fishing village on 16 kilometres east of the tourist town of Ocho Rios, the commitment of the fishermen who initiated the project and their private sector partners have kept the reef and replanted corals clean and healthy, demonstrating how successful the process can be in restoring the local fisheries.

“The fishermen have done a beautiful job of keeping the corals alive and the fish sanctuary successful,” Ross says of the project he started in 2009.

Much of Jamaica’s reefs have reportedly been smothered by silt from eroding hillsides, the algal blooms from eutrophication as a result of agricultural run-offs and the disposal of sewage in the coastal waters.

The reefs are critical to Jamaica’s economy as tourism services account for a quarter of all jobs and more than 50 per cent of foreign exchange earnings.  Fisheries directly employ an estimated 33,000 people. Overall, the Caribbean makes between 5.0 and 11 billion dollars each year from fishing and tourism, an indication of the importance of reefs to the economies of the islands.

The Restoration Project provides the CMS with the resources to undertake a series of research activities “to among other things mitigate coral depletion, and identify and cultivate species that are resistant to the ravages of the impact of climate change,” Webber says.

In an email outlining the process, he notes that the project will provide “applicable information and techniques to other countries in the region that are experiencing similar challenges,” during its 18-month lifetime.

Expectations are that at the end of the project, there will be visible changes in coral cover. The successes seen in Oracabessa, where fishermen report improvements in catch rates and fish sizes, and at other sites are an indication that coral gardening is working.

Like Ross, Webber expects that there will be changes in coral cover at replanting sites within a three- to five-year period.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A wind park in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, where local communities and indigenous people are fighting the installation of wind turbines in their territory. Credit: Courtesy of the International Service for Peace (SIPAZ)

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jun 3 2015 (IPS)

“It hurts us that our land is affected, and the environmental impacts are not even measured. Wind farm projects affect streams and hurt the flora,” said Zapotec Indian Isabel Jiménez, who is taking part in the struggle against the installation of a wind park in southern Mexico.

The 42-year-old healer says the turbines endanger medicinal plants, which are essential for her traditional healing work in the city of Juchitán in the state of Oaxaca, 720 km south of the capital.

“We are right, we know the truth,” Jiménez told IPS. “That’s why we are resisting this, and exercising our rights.”

The Zapotec indigenous woman is one of the leaders of the opposition to the Energía Eólica del Sur (Wind Energy of the South) company’s plans to build a wind park in the area to generate 396 MW that would feed into regional power grids.

Jiménez belongs to the Asamblea Popular del Pueblo Juchiteco – the Juchiteco People’s Assembly – founded in February 2013 to protect the rights of native communities in the face of the introduction of wind farms in their territories.

They are protesting the ecological, social and economic damage caused by wind parks.“They threaten us, they insult us, they spy on us, they block our roads. We don’t want any more wind turbines; they have to respect our territory because it is the last land we have left.” – Isabel Jiménez

In addition, they are complaining about incompliance with International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, which requires prior, free and informed consent, and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, both of which have been ratified by Mexico.

In November an inter-institutional technical committee made up of delegates of local, state and federal governments began a consultation process with regard to the wind park, and decided to conclude the informative phase in April despite the objections raised by local communities, and move on to the deliberative phase to discuss the viewpoints of the different parties.

Local inhabitants worry that the procedure followed will be used as a model for future projects forming part of the country’s energy reform, whose legal framework was enacted in August 2014, opening up electricity generation and sales, including renewables, as well as oil and gas extraction, refining, distribution and retailing, to participation by the domestic and foreign private sectors.

“The problem is that there has been no consultation process to obtain free, prior and informed consent,” Antonio López, a lawyer with the non-governmental Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Project (PRODESC), told IPS. “They are trying to speed up these processes, and the conditions are created to hold a certain kind of consultation process favourable to the projects.”

PRODESC advises local communities in the area in defence of their rights.

On Apr. 24, Zapotec communities filed a lawsuit in federal court against the consultation process that was carried out. The ruling is expected to be handed down shortly.

Juchitán is located in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a windy narrow land bridge between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca where a large proportion of the country’s wind energy projects are being developed.

The isthmus, which is 200 km wide, is now home to 21 wind farms, including 12 in Juchitán, according to the Mexican Wind Energy Association.

Renewable energies, not including large hydropower dams, account for seven percent of electricity generation in Mexico. Wind power generates 2,551 MW a year, and the plan is to scale that up to 15,000 MW by 2020.

According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, there are 11 million indigenous people, distributed in 54 different communities, in this country of 120 million people. But that figure is considered an underestimate because it only includes people over five who speak a native language.

The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is mainly inhabited by Zapotec, Huave, Zoque, Mixe and Chontal Indians.

“There have been many problems with the application of the consultation process, such as a lack of information and attacks on community leaders and rights defenders,” Andrea Cerami, a lawyer with the defence and public policies section of the non-governmental Mexican Centre for Environmental Law (CEMDA), told IPS.

He said that when a state plans infrastructure works or other projects in native territories without due consultation, it violates the rights of communities, which are protected by international treaties and national laws.

Mexico’s laws on fossil fuels and the power industry, which form part of the country’s energy reform, stipulate that local communities must be consulted. But the law on fossil fuels does not offer a way out for the owners of land, who must reach an agreement with the public or private companies in question or accept an eventual court verdict.

Civil society organisations complain that the planned energy projects would overlap rural indigenous territories – a source of conflict that makes properly conducted consultation processes essential.

Since January, Rarámuri indigenous communities in the northern state of Sinaloa have blocked the construction of a gas pipeline between Sinaloa and the U.S. state of Texas across the border, until a consultation process is carried out to obtain their free, prior and informed consent.

The Yaqui Indians in the northern state of Sonora are likewise fighting the Acueducto Independencia, a pipeline that has carried water from Sonora to the northern city of Hermosillo since March 2013, despite several victories in court by the native communities.

In Oaxaca, Mixe indigenous groups had to go to federal court to see their right to consultation enforced before the National Water Commission, with respect to the use of wells on their land.

“They threaten us, they insult us, they spy on us, they block our roads,” complained Jiménez, who has practiced traditional healing since 1993. “We don’t want any more wind turbines; they have to respect our territory because it is the last land we have left.”

Energía Eólica del Sur has a history of conflicts. Until 2013 the company was named Mareña Renovables, which tried to build a 396 MW wind farm in the town of San Dionisio del Mar, on Oaxaca’s Pacific coast.

But the wind park, with a projected investment of 1.2 billion dollars, including 75 million from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), has been stalled since 2013 as a result of court verdicts in favour of the local communities that would have been affected. As a result, Energía Eólica del Sur decided to move to Juchitán.

In December 2012 the international Indian Law Resource Center filed a complaint on behalf of 225 inhabitants of seven indigenous communities with the IDB’s Independent Consultation and Investigation Mechanism (ICIM), regarding the loan.

The complaint seeks damages given the absence of adequate consultation with the communities at the start of the project and the lack of measures in its design and execution aimed at avoiding negative impacts.

In September 2013, the IBD’s Panel of the Compliance Review Phase admitted the complaint. It has been investigating the case since December 2014, in order to draw up a report and proceed to oversee compliance with its provisions.

“This is an opportunity to make sure people are informed in the future,” López said. “We want to give the legal system a chance to respect human rights.”

Cerami, whose organisation, CEMDA, advises the Yaqui Indians in their struggle, said the consultation process helps defuse conflicts.

“Already existing social and environmental conflicts can be exacerbated, and they can escalate in intensity and trigger other kinds of actions,” he said. “The consultation is a mechanism for dialogue that should favour broad participation and help parties with different interests reach understandings.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The rice industry is the second most important agricultural sector in Guyana, second only to sugar in foreign exchange earnings. An Indian think tank is helping the country to reduce energy costs in its sugar and rice sectors. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Apr 1 2014 (IPS)

Guyana is shaping up to set a gold standard for the Caribbean in implementing a national energy efficiency strategy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

“Energy efficiency is the main method of fighting climate change and its impact [is global] since unclean energy is the main contributor,” the associate director of the Energy Resource Institute (TERI) of India, Dr. Rudra Narsimha Rao, told IPS.“The political leadership here has shown vision and a commitment to the communities to make sure that they know what was going on." -- Jan Hartke

“While inefficiencies in the energy sector are a global challenge, Guyana’s efforts can better position it to battle the devastating impacts of climate change,” added Rao, whose group is helping the country to reduce energy costs in its sugar and rice sectors.

TERI is collaborating with the government under the framework of its Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) to carry out an energy audit of the industrial agricultural sector. Findings and recommendations were handed over to key stakeholders on Mar. 24.

According to the World Bank, energy efficiency measures can reduce carbon emissions in some cases by as much as 65 percent.

Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) researchers estimate that the region could reduce its energy consumption by 10 percent over the next decade and save tens of billions of dollars by adopting existing technologies to increase efficiency.

IDB-financed projects have proven that the return on investment for efficient lighting and electric motor programmes, for example, is higher than building new energy capacity.

Now, the Bank is helping specific sectors – such as biofuels and water utilities – to reduce operating costs through investments in more efficient technology. It is financing programmes that will boost the electricity output and prolong the life of existing hydroelectric complexes by upgrading their turbines.

And it is underwriting programmes to reduce electricity transmission losses and build smarter power grids within countries and across borders.

Rao warned that ignoring the potential of energy efficiency will result in greater risks, in particular for developing countries.

Guyana’s annual energy consumption accounts for approximately five million barrels of oil, equivalent from a variety of energy sources – diesel, fuel, gasoline, avgas, LPG, kerosene, bagasse, fuelwood, charcoal, solar, biodiesel, biogas and wind.

Over the past few months, TERI has been spearheading a two-phase project which gives technical support to the government in the areas of climate change and energy. This second phase of the project was aimed at improving the output of the rice, sugar and manufacturing sectors.

Agencies which participated in the project include the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo), the Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB), the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) and the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association (GMSA).

About 80 percent of Guyana’s forests, some 15 million hectares, have remained untouched over time. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

Rao said that the studies were conducted with rice mills, sugar estates, sawmills and manufacturing agencies to promote energy management and conservation and increase outputs.

The head of the Office of Climate Change, Shyam Nokta, said energy efficiency should also be seen as a lifestyle and behavioural approach, a concept that is advanced under Guyana’s LCDS.

The LCDS, a brainchild of former President Bharrat Jagdeo, sets out a vision to forge a new low carbon economy in Guyana over the coming decade. It has received critical acclaim globally.

“No responsible country should ignore this issue since energy efficiency adds to the development trajectory of Guyana’s LCDS,” Agriculture Minister Dr. Leslie Ramsammy told IPS.

Ramsammy also believes that the region’s development trajectory must reduce agriculture’s environmental footprint, reduce vulnerability to climate change, boost food security, and add to the energy stock through biofuel production.

He appealed to Caribbean nations to “consider climate-smart agriculture” if they want to sustain economic and social prosperity.

“Climate change is real, it is affecting our countries, it has already impacted on our countries,” Ramsammy told IPS.

Guyana is also benefitting from expert advice about all renewable energy possibilities through a pact with the Clinton Foundation’s Climate Initiative.

The agreement includes a team of experts “to package programmes for renewable energy that have a commercial capability to attract major financing,” said Jan Hartke, global director of the Clinton Climate Initiative Clean Energy Project.

“We’re advisors, we recommend, we don’t make any decisions. The sovereign nation makes all of those decisions,” he stressed.

Hartke, who has travelled to Guyana on numerous occasions, said he is fully au-fait with the government’s renewable energy vision and the many interventions made through the LCDS.

Among them is a solar energy programme in the hinterland that has equipped about 15,000 households with photovoltaic systems that accumulate about two megawatts of power.

“The political leadership here has shown vision and has shown a commitment to the communities to make sure that they know what was going on… I think that kind of political leadership is one of the things that the Clinton Climate Initiative is all about,” Hartke said.

The Clinton Foundation had been a key supporter in the preliminary work on Guyana’s LCDS. The strategy seeks to strike a balance between sustained management of the country’s vast forests and unhindered economic development.

The Amaila Falls Hydropower Project (AFHP) is a key component of the strategy that is projected to account for 90 percent of the country’s energy generation and reduce the need for fossil fuel consumption.

“We are very deeply interested in renewable energy,” President Donald Ramotar said.

“Now that we have developed to such a stage… I think that we can benefit in cutting down that cost and using clean energy with what is now demanded of the world today, with all the problems of climate change and other issues,” Ramotar added.

Bogotá is famous for its vast network of bike lanes. Credit: Helda Martínez/IPS

By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Dec 17 2013 (IPS)

“I ride 43 km a day and I love it,” said Carlos Cantor in Bogotá, Colombia. “Five years ago I switched my car for a bike,” explained Tomás Fuenzalida from Santiago, Chile.

They are both part of the burgeoning growth of cycling as a transport solution in Latin America.

But in the second-most urbanised region in the world, public sentiment towards bicycles is mixed, with some seeing them as a symbol of low socioeconomic status, says the “Biciciudades 2013” study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) with regard to the expansion of this sustainable means of transport in large and medium-sized cities in the region.

The report, based on surveys and commissioned by the IDB’s Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative, found that between 0.4 and 10 percent of the population in the region use a bicycle as their main means of transportation.

Among the cities studied, Cochabamba in Bolivia heads the list, with 10 percent of the population depending on the bicycle. It is followed by La Paz, Bolivia, and Asunción, the Paraguayan capital, with five percent. All of these are intermediate cities with populations between 100,000 and two million people.

Among the big cities, in Santiago and Mexico City, three percent of the population use bicycles as their main means of transport, followed by Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, and Bogotá, with two percent.

Bogotá is known as a world leader in bike paths, with 376 km of “ciclorutas” or dedicated lanes – one of the most extensive networks in the world – and 120 km of recreational paths. In addition, car traffic is cut on some streets on Sundays and holidays.

Cantor, a 58-year-old communications specialist, took a break from his daily ride to tell Tierramérica about his experience cycling in the city. “You can go fast, because there’s no traffic; on some stretches I even enjoy the greenery and the quiet,” he said. “There’s a lot of solidarity, and you make friends.”

The Secretariat of Mobility of the Capital District estimates that in Bogotá, a city of around eight million people, local residents make about 450,000 bike trips a day. The largest group of bicycle users are manual labourers and factory workers, followed by students from lower-income families.

The recreational bike paths date back to 1974 and are used by an average of one million people every Sunday.

“I love the [recreational] bike paths, I use them every Sunday,” law student Carolina Mejía told Tierramérica. “But I don’t use the ciclorutas, because many of them havent’ been completed yet, and there are stretches that you have to share with cars and buses, and that scares me. Also, it’s not safe.”

Cantor agreed that there are safety concerns: “Every day bicycles are stolen, and there’s a brisk trade in stolen bicycles. In a question of seconds they change the colour with a spray can and your bike disappears.” But he said “people learn to use less pretentious bikes, and they put marks on them so it’s harder to sell them underground.”

Fuenzalida, 44, swapped his car for a bike in the Chilean capital “for my health,” because “you get exercise without paying a single peso in the gym” and because “it is much nicer to ride a bike than to take the subway, for example.”

The public relations specialist not only pedals to work, but also uses the bike to take his kids to school, go to meetings, or visit family members.

For people like him, the Santiago city government is implementing a “master plan” to extend bike lanes to a total of 933 km. The city currently has 215 km of bike lanes, while there are 130 km of paths in adjacent rural municipalities.

Greater Santiago is home to over five million people.

“This is one of the keys to increasing the use of bicycles, and for the city and residents of Santiago to see the benefits in the easing of traffic congestion and for health and the environment,” the Chilean government’s spokesperson Cecilia Pérez told Tierramérica.

The mayor of the Santiago metropolitan area, Juan Antonio Peribonio, told Tierramérica that the plan would be ready in 2022 and that lanes were being built to connect the existing paths. To that will be added a public system to lend out bicycles, in order to promote cycling.

But not everything is positive for cyclists. “Sometimes pedestrians, taxi drivers or car drivers insult me, they call me stupid,” said Laurie Fachaux, a 28-year-old French journalist who has lived in Chile for a few months. “They should get used to the fact that I have a right to be on the streets just like they do.”

Antonia Larraín, 37, believes that part of the problem is the lack of regulations protecting cyclists. “If an accident happens, there is total impunity,” said the psychologist, who pedals 13 km a day to and from work.

Enrique Rojas, 50, who has driven a taxi for 30 years in Santiago, reflected the other side of the coin. “Cyclists are careless, they wind in and out of the cars and don’t respect traffic signals; I have often almost hit one of them because they didn’t stop for a red light or because they were riding at night without any light,” he commented to Tierramérica.

“Cyclists should also have to take out a permit, and bicycles should have licence plates. They shouldn’t just be able to get on their bikes and not worry about anything – they leave their safety in the hands of others,” he complained.

But bicycle use is growing nonetheless, like in greater Mexico City, which has a population of around 20 million.

“It has been a relatively short process,” said Xavier Treviño, director of the Mexican office of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). “The greatest success has been turning cycling into an alternative means of transport, and the main strength has been promotion of cycling,” he told Tierramérica.

The most visible symbol of cycling in the Mexican capital is the Ecobici Individual Transportation System, which since its launch in 2010 has drawn 87,000 users of 4,000 bicycles at 275 stations along 22 km of paths. Users register and pay 31 dollars a year.

Mexico City also has 90 km of separated and non-separated bike lanes. “Systems like Ecobici provide incentives for continued growth. It’s positive inertia. But infrastructure is lacking. All main roads should have infrastructure for bicycles,” Treviño said.

According to Ecociudades 2013, nearly all of the 18 intermediate and six large cities studied have bike lanes, with the exception of Asunción, Paraguay and Manizales, Colombia.

But only Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Asunción, La Paz and Montevideo – the capital of Uruguay – have regulations for urban cycling, as Rojas, the taxi driver, was calling for.

With reporting by Helda Martínez (Bogotá), Emilio Godoy (Mexico City) and Marianela Jarroud (Santiago).

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Children in Georgetown, Guyana learn about solar energy during an exhibition. Credit: CREDP

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jul 8 2013 (IPS)

When James Husbands, a 24-year-old Barbadian businessman, began weighing the possibility of manufacturing solar water heaters, there was already a prototype on the island that had been designed and installed by an Anglican priest living there in the early 1970s.

A market study on the viability of producing solar water heaters had been done by a local NGO. This study, coupled with the Barbados government’s imposition of import duties on the solar water heaters sold by an Australian company to the island, convinced James that the time was right to enter the field."Governments cannot promote what they do not understand and utilities do not promote what they are not supplying themselves." -- CREDP's Thomas Scheutzlich

Husbands, now managing director of Solar Dynamics, told the IPS that government support in the late 1970s was crucial to the success of his venture in the early days. Barbados currently has the fifth highest penetration worldwide of solar water heaters per thousand households.

Arnaldo Vieira de Carvalho, a specialist in the Energy Division of the Infrastructure and Environment Sector of the Inter-American Development Bank, told IPS that Latin America and the Caribbean use renewable energy (RE) in much greater proportion than any other region, although much of that is hydropower and biofuels. The use of wind and solar remain quite small.

IDB and its partners have sponsored a competition since 2009 for RE and Energy Efficiency projects in the Caribbean, the winners of which receive up to 100,000 dollars in financing and technical support. Eight winners were selected last year. The competition, IDEAS, has among its criteria that winners’ projects should benefit the poor, gender equity, and indigenous communities.

An added incentive to accelerate the slow pace of RE development, even though the region is not a major source of fossil fuel emissions, is the spate of devastating natural disasters over the past decade.

Ulric Trotz, deputy director and science adviser of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC), told IPS in an e-mail, “Extreme weather events (often associated with climate change) have caused significant damage to the region. For example, Hurricane Ivan in Grenada wiped out approximately 200 percent of her GDP in 2004. Similarly, a one in 100-year flood in Guyana in 2005 wiped out more than 60 percent of that country’s GDP in that year, moving it from a positive growth position to a negative real growth.”

Consequently, Caribbean governments have begun taking a more proactive approach to promoting the development of renewable energy, establishing an Energy Unit at the Caricom regional headquarters which works in conjunction with the CCCCC.

Trotz said promoting renewable energy is important, because “by diverting costs away from the importation of fossil fuels, [Caribbean] countries will have additional resources from the savings to put towards building resilience to the impacts of Climate Change and Climate Vulnerability.

“It is not just the conversion to renewable energy but energy efficiency” that the region is focusing on, he said.

He added that “pooling RE projects across the region might have a catalytic effect of encouraging investment as this may significantly lower transaction costs and make investment more attractive.”

The Caribbean, apart from Trinidad and Tobago, which is an oil producer, currently spends billions on the importation of fossil fuels every year. In May, while on a visit to Trinidad, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden made the point that energy costs in the region need to be lowered and the use of renewable energy increased.

“There’s probably no group of nations better situated to take advantage of renewable energy possibilities than here in the Caribbean. And we know that many Caribbean nations pay three times more for energy than we do in the United States of America…[We] are working together on this, looking to invest in connected regional grids to create economies of scale and renewable energy – economies of scale that are driven by renewable energy,” he said.

The region has also sought the assistance of European Union partners, and launched the Caribbean Renewable Energy Development Programme with the major objective of strengthening the ability of Caribbean countries to mobilise investors to make the shift from conventional energy investment to renewable energy investment.

According to Thomas Scheutzlich, principal advisor of the Caribbean Renewable Energy Program (CREDP) since 2003, lack of an enabling legal policy framework and lack of well-defined bankable project proposals have been major barriers to the development of RE projects in the Caribbean region.

Scheutzlich has overall responsibility for implementation of the CREDP programme on behalf of the German consultancy company Projekt-Consult GmbH, which is charged by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) with the implementation of CREDP. Germany is responsible for 80 percent of CREDP’s funding.

One problem is that many banks in the region are unsure of the economic soundness of RE ventures and are unable to judge the risks inherent in such new technology, Scheutzlich said. The lack of government guarantees also makes traditional banks reluctant to back such ventures.

However, regional and international banks such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the European Investment Bank, and the Caribbean Development Bank “are all looking for bankable energy projects and offer financing,” he said.

Scheutzlich added that, “There is still a widespread and general lack of understanding of the potential of indigenous energy sources and energy efficiency throughout the society. Subsequently, governments cannot promote what they do not understand and utilities do not promote what they are not supplying themselves.”

Utility companies in the region generally have universal monopoly over the generation, transmission, distribution, and sale of electricity. “This is their traditional business model and they will only divert from that model if it is economically attractive” for them to do so, he said.

But despite the slow pace in the Caribbean, during the last few years the energy landscape has been “positively changing with the change processes accelerating and gaining a certain dynamism, and this is exactly what CREDP wants to trigger.”

Poverty no longer explains the high secondary school dropout rate in Argentina, one of the richest countries in Latin America.

Experts say a growing number of adolescents express a lack of interest in education, a phenomenon that can be found across the region.

A recent survey of 13-15 year olds in eight Latin American countries, carried out by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), found that “lack of interest” was the top reason youngsters had left school.

According to Graduate XXI, an IDB initiative to prevent high school dropout in Latin America, nearly one out of every two students in Latin America does not finish secondary school.

Argentina’s Education Ministry has the goal of guaranteeing universal access to and completion of secondary education. Enrolment rose eight percent between the 2001 and 2010 censuses.

But school absenteeism and dropout are still a big challenge.

According to the authorities, 89 percent of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 are in high school. But the latest statistics show that many of them will not graduate on time.

However, two weeks after requesting precise official figures on school dropout rates, IPS had still not received a response.

A study published this year by the Ibero American Science and Technology Education Consortium (ISTEC) says economic difficulties have been replaced by a lack of interest as the main reason that teenagers are dropping out of school.

The report notes that 30 percent of youngsters who leave secondary school come from the middle and upper classes.

The issue was studied in 18 countries of the region by the Information System on Educational Trends in Latin America (SITEAL), developed by ISTEC and the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP). The study was coordinated by Argentine experts Lilia Toranzos and Norberto López.

An extract on six countries, including Argentina, was later published.

“The statistics surprised us, because we were used to the traditional arguments explaining school desertion as being related to socioeconomic causes, access to the labour market, or teenage pregnancy. This means we have to rethink education,” Toranzos told IPS.

“In the past, the reasons kids dropped out were not linked to what school offered, but to the families themselves,” she said. But the new reasons mentioned in surveys indicate that schools are not catering properly to youngsters, she adding.

Toranzos said the growing access by adolescents to secondary education in the last few decades led to a much more heterogeneous student body than in the past, which poses new challenges for teachers. “The same old formulas are still followed, even when they don’t work,” she said.

“Forty years ago, the population that made it to secondary school was homogeneous and similar to the model of the urban middle-class student for whom the system was designed,” she said. “Now there is greater diversity, different family backgrounds and different interests, and schools continue to think in terms of a kind of student who is largely a thing of the past.”

In the face of the new diversity, many teachers believe the correct response is to “keep the bar high, because that way they can maintain the prestige of the school or of the teachers themselves. They don’t think that, if half of the students are failing, the strategy must not be working,” Toranzos said.

The director of the Fundación Cimientos, Agustina Cavanagh, concurred. The organisation she runs works with teenagers from poor families, providing support of different kinds, including scholarships, to students who would end up dropping out otherwise.

“They enroll, yes, but they have a hard time staying in school,” she told IPS. “They reach secondary school already behind in skills, and the challenge is just too big. They feel they are on their own, fail and repeat subjects, get frustrated, and start to skip class. They don’t see any reason to stay in school.

“In 1950, only 10 percent of adolescents enrolled in secondary school, compared to 90 or 95 percent today,” Cavanagh said. “But that huge leap was not accompanied by teaching approaches that sufficiently motivate students, which is why a lot of kids feel they can achieve more outside the classroom than in it.

“The contents of the curriculum do not really work to motivate them. They say they want to learn, but they describe school as a place that’s cold, unwelcoming, with broken glass in the windows. The thing is, although a great effort is made, there are schools with very little funding, which are attended by the kids with the greatest needs.”

The experts in Cimientos worked with young people to investigate what motivated them, and what hurdles they faced along the way. “For them, participation is a very important factor, but they say the teacher shouldn’t expect students to always follow the rule of raising their hands, because that complicates matters,” Cavanagh said.

Early parenthood is still a major reason that youngsters drop out of school. In the SITEAL study, the issue is included in the category of “domestic” problems, because teenagers also drop out of school to do housework and take care of younger siblings or elderly members of the family.

These factors account for 10 percent of school dropouts in the countries studied by SITEAL. And 97 percent of those who cite these reasons are female.

By contrast, 20 percent of youngsters leave school to work, and of that group, 70 percent are male.

But 31 percent, cutting across the entire socioeconomic spectrum, said they dropped out because of a lack of motivation or interest. That in fact was the number one reason cited.

Cavanagh said teachers continue to expect a different kind of student than the ones who show up in their classrooms. “It’s hard for them to understand that the educational backgrounds in the students’ homes vary greatly, that many come from poor families whose parents did not go to secondary school and whose families have no notion of what it’s like.”

In 2009, the centre-left government of Cristina Fernández introduced the Universal Child Allowance, a cash transfer to parents who are unemployed or work in the informal sector of the economy or as domestics, pregnant women, and disabled people of any age.

The allowance is 340 pesos (62 dollars) per month per child under 18, to be raised to
460 pesos (88 dollars) in June, and is conditional on school attendance and keeping up-to-date on vaccines and medical checkups. It is received by the families of more than 3.3 million children and adolescents in this country of 41 million people.

Another strong incentive for youngsters to stay in school came in 2010, when the Programa Conectar Igualdad (Connect Equality Programme) was launched.

So far, the programme has distributed 2.5 million laptops to public secondary school students around the country. The youngsters keep the laptops if they graduate, but have to give them back if they drop out.

But even with these measures, school dropout rates remain high.

The challenge, the experts say, is to make school more attractive and interesting, so classes are no longer seen as irrelevant, boring and pointless. “The question of incomes is no longer sufficient to explain this,” Cavanagh underscored.

Weeds sprouting through the gravel at the Expo site. Photo: HGW/Jude Stanley Roy

By Correspondents
ZORANJE, Haiti, Oct 2 2012 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

The smells and scenes that greet a visitor to this eerily empty collection of over 60 brightly painted homes and buildings verge on the obscene.

Some of the houses are filled with piles of desiccated human excrement, their recently built living rooms and kitchens turned into public latrines. A few appear occupied by squatters. Paint is chipping. Doors have been torn from hinges, toilets and sinks ripped out.

This was one of the first Haiti reconstruction projects to receive approval, funding – over two million dollars – and the enthusiastic backing of former President Bill Clinton. Just months after the devastating Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake killed over 200,000 people and drove another 1.3 million into squalid camps, the Building Back Better Communities (BBBC) project got the green light from the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC), headed by Clinton and then-Haitian Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive.

The idea was to “expose best practices for housing reconstruction by encouraging innovative ideas” with a “Housing Exposition” and to build an “Exemplar Community”, an IHRC document explains. The Clinton Foundation gave 500,000 dollars; the Inter-American Development Bank gave another 1.2 million dollars; the Deutsche Bank Foundation, the British government and even the Haitian government all contributed, according to officials involved with the project.

But 14 months after Clinton himself opened the Expo on this former farmland just outside the capital, most of the model homes sit empty. There are more goats than humans at the two-hectare site. Well over a dozen have been severely vandalised. All of them were built by Haitian and foreign firms which spent an average of 25,000 dollars each – over 1.5 million dollars altogether – to compete for contracts and in the hopes their model would be chosen for the Exemplar Community of 150 homes that was to be part of the project.

“All these houses had a security guard,” a young woman sleepily told visitors recently as she stood in the doorway of a little yellow house, built by Colorado-based RCI Systems and priced at 10,000 dollars.

A disheveled mattress lay on the floor behind her. “A lot of the guards left because they hadn’t been paid,” she said.

A four-month investigation by Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) confirmed that apart from admiration last July, the Expo and Exemplar Community project have been ignored, as have the architects, the construction firms, and the site and the houses themselves.

Expo-nential Errors, Waste and…

The Expo was dreamed up a few months after the earthquake during a meeting at Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to architect and former Haitian government official Leslie Voltaire, one of its originators.

The government would hold a competition and forum where local and foreign contractors could propose housing solutions. At the end, the houses would be handed over to homeless families, who would have to keep them clean so that interested individuals, humanitarian agencies or private builders could visit at any time.

“It was a kind of win-win,” said Voltaire in an exclusive interview with Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW). “The builder makes a gift, but also has an example that can be seen by NGOs.”

The architecture firm John McAslan and Partners of London was brought in, and soon the plan expanded to include the “Exemplar Community” – a village of 150 homes built with an “Expo” model house to be chosen by a jury, the architecture and planning schools at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) came on board to work on the Exemplar Community and recommend appropriate environmental, social and economic measures.

The Deutschebank Foundation committed 50,000 dollars, and on Aug. 17, 2010, the IHRC gave the green light, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) said it would prepare the site: about two hectares of very low floodplain land that had to be filled in with gravel.

“The zone is really low, so you have to fill in, at least one metre. And each cubic metre costs about, I think now it’s 25 U.S. dollars,” IDB urban designer Arcindo Santos explained.

None of the estimated 10 million cubic metres of earthquake rubble was used, the planner added, because “earthquake material wasn’t ready or available”. Instead, it took about 20,000 truckloads of gravel and fill dug from riverbeds and hillsides.

Voltaire decided to run for president soon after the project got started, so it was handed to the ministry of tourism and its minister, Patrick Delatour. The competition drew over 500 applications.

“In my opinion, the Expo was a success because we completed our mission, meaning, we organised a conference on housing and prototypes were constructed,” the former minister told HGW.

The architectural firm pulled in to oversee the competition John McAslan and Partners of London, agreed.

“The competition ranked as among the most successful in the world,” McAslan’s Nick Rutherford said in a telephone interview, because the contest generated what he called “affordable and sustainable houses”.

But the 60 or so models eventually chosen have an average price tag of 21,000 dollars and range up to 69,000 dollars – steep prices for humanitarian organisations, and even more steep for the population, most of whom live on less than two dollars a day. And many of houses are made with imported materials.

“Success” or not, the exposition did not take place in November 2010 as planned. Instead, the government decided to hold a housing conference in January 2011, and planned the Expo for later in the year.

“That was a kind of lollipop they gave contractors to keep them interested,” Voltaire admitted. “They were saying, ‘Nothing is happening!’ etc., so they (the government) did a conference.”

“It was the biggest joke I’ve ever seen,” deplored John Sorge of Innovative Composites International (ICI), a firm with offices in both the U.S. and Canada. “It was a hoodwink to promote the government… the whole Expo was a farce.”

And the Exemplar Community? Harvard and MIT teams made various visits to Haiti, and a Haitian delegation flew north for a retreat on Martha’s Vineyard Island, a swank vacation spot favoured by President Barack Obama. The effort produced an interesting bilingual report – but no community. The ball was dropped. The money needed wasn’t raised.

Read Part Two – Haiti’s Two-Million-Dollar Ghost Town

*Note: Most interviews for this article were conducted in early 2012.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.