Green Recovery and Reconstruction

The Earth flag is not an official flag, since ...

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Green Recovery and Reconstruction Toolkit; Rebuilding Stronger, Safer, Environmentally Sustainable Communities after Disasters.  The World Wildlife Federation and the American Red Cross, two leading institutions in the fields of environmental conservation and humanitarian aid, developed a training toolkit to equip field staff working in humanitarian aid, government, and conservation with practical, solution-oriented techniques for integrating environmental sustainability into disaster recovery and reconstruction.

Although disasters wreak havoc, the rebuilding effort that follows represents a significant and important opportunity to rebuild communities that are more environmentally and socially sustainable than what existed before the disaster.  Humanitarian aid and conservation practitioners, government officials, local communities, and donor organizations can all take specific steps to ensure reconstructed communities are built back safer through actively addressing environmental sustainability and reducing risk and vulnerability to future disasters.

Recovery in Haiti – one year after the earthquake

The Haitian National Palace shows heavy damage...

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Jan. 7th,Still Shaky; A Year After the Earthquake in Haiti, the Key to Stability Is to Build the State. RAND report, Jan. 7, 2011. This short report focuses on the public administration of recovery, which is a very crucial issue in Haiti.

This is one of several articles that appeared today covering the non-recovery story in Haiti. One article cited Oxfam, the British Non-Governmental Organization, and criticized President Bill Clinton for some of the problems. The Oxfam website has an article critical of the Haitian authorities. Clearly there is lots of blame for all major parties involved.  Below is an article from The Economist (Jan. 6, 2011) titled  The year of surviving in squalor.

Even allowing for some unique difficulties, the efforts of the government and outsiders to rebuild have been disappointing. But when visiting journalists parachute in to Port-au-Prince for the anniversary of the earthquake, they will see few signs of progress and many of stasis. Rubble still blocks many streets. Even if the work of removing it goes according to the official schedule, less than half will be cleared by October. Only about 30,000 temporary shelters have been built. The National Palace, the emblem of Haitian sovereignty, has yet to be demolished, let alone rebuilt. The tent camps that dot the city look ever-shabbier, and their inhabitants thinner and more bedraggled.

This landscape of neglect and degradation mocks the widespread hope in the weeks after the quake that Haiti could “build back better,” as Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy to the country, put it. The government’s promising reconstruction plan, unveiled at a donor conference in March, envisioned moving many people outside the swollen capital and injecting economic life into rural areas, as well as rebuilding Port-au-Prince.

The net outcome  has been a miserable year for Haitian victims.

Presidential Oil Spill Commission- previews of final report

January 7, From the NYTimes, Failure in the Gulf.

January 5, 2011. Article re BP, Transocean, Halliburton blamed by presidential Gulf oil spill commission.

The presidential oil spill commission on Wednesday blamed the Gulf of Mexico oil spill last year on “missteps and oversights” by oil giant BP, rig owner Transocean and contractor Halliburton, saying those errors were “rooted in systemic failures” and could happen again.

The commission said that the April 20 blowout at BP’s Macondo well was not inevitable, but rather a failure of management in which officials from all three firms ignored critical warning signs and failed to take precautions that might have delayed the completion of the well but also might have averted the environmental disaster.