Monitoring Land Change in Haiti
Monitoring Land Change in Haiti
Project Summary
Monitoring changes to land use and value in Northern Haiti through collaborative ethnographic and remote sensing approaches
Environmental change in politically unstable regions remains under-theorized, particularly where forest estimates and narratives of deforestation overshadow localized dynamics of land use. While much attention has focused on forest loss, agricultural landscapes provide insights on how land managers respond to mounting external political and climate pressures. In this context, the relationships among land security, land value, and land manager’s agricultural investments remain unexplored. In part, quantification of these dynamics has been hampered technologically by the inability to view the landscape at the same resolution as the smallholder farming processes unfolding below. Northern Haiti, characterized by political upheaval and increasing land grabs, serves as a critical site to explore how smallholding land managers negotiate and respond to dynamics of political instability and environmental change.
This project addresses these neglected questions of land use change by building collaborative research models in Northern Haiti. It works in collaboration with Action pour la Reforestation et la Défense de l’Environnement (AREDE), a Haitian grassroots environmental group focused on environmental issues and peasant rights. By integrating dense time series of parcel-scale remote sensing, collaborative ethnographic research, and participatory knowledge co-production workshops, the study offers a novel approach to understanding environmental change in areas where traditional fieldwork is challenging.
This project was a recipient of the CECE Faculty Research Incubator Program in 2023.
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