Assessing Human Vulnerability to Climate Change from an Evolutionary Perspective - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 72

200 years, Haiti experienced 32 coups and a long period of oppression by dictators.
A root cause of the third variety may have been Haiti's “restavèk” system, in which
it is socially acceptable for impoverished families to send their children to work as
servants for more affl uent households. The UN ( 2009 b ) has called this system a
modern form of slavery.
Dynamic pressures are the forces through which root causes give rise to unsafe
conditions. For example, in Haiti, global trade liberalization contributed to the
dynamic pressure of declining agricultural livelihoods due to competition from
cheaper imports. This decline caused Haiti to be highly susceptible to commodity
price spikes, such as the one that triggered food riots in Port-au-Prince in 2008. It
also led to the further dynamic pressure of increased rural-to-urban migration and
slum formation. The root cause of the restavèk system created another dynamic
pressure in which numerous children were growing up as slaves of families in
slums, in many cases exposed to economic exploitation, sexual violence and corpo-
ral punishment (UN 2009 b ).
Haiti's historically dysfunctional political system may have given rise to the
dynamic pressure of endemic corruption in its government. In 2009, Haiti ranked
168 out of 180 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perception
Index. Chile, on the other hand, ranked 25th (Transparency International 2009 ).
Corruption may have contributed to other dynamic pressures such as insuffi cient
investment in education and training in appropriate skills, and a lack of economic
productivity. In 2007, Haiti ranked 152 out of 181 countries in the UN's Education
Index 4 ; Chile placed 49th (UN 2009 a ). Likewise, where prior to the earthquake
72 % of Haiti's population lived on under US$2 per day, 2.7 % of Chile's population
lived under the same mark (UN 2009 a ). Inadequate skills, corruption and dysfunc-
tional government may also have prevented the development of other important
institutions, such as insurance programmes, and prevented the enforcement of oth-
ers, such as building codes. Haitian authorities had banned building with brick after
previous earthquakes in 1751, 1770, 1842 and 1946, and had mandated that new
buildings be constructed of wood. However, by 2010, despite research predicting
future seismic activity, it had had long since stopped enforcing even minimal build-
ing codes. Chile's building codes, on the other hand, refl ected present-day interna-
tional engineering knowledge regarding seismic safety (Kovacs 2010 ). They were
also widely adhered to, due largely to a law that requires building companies to
compensate those who suffer loss in the event of partial or complete destruction of
a faulty building (Hinrichs et al. 2011 ).
Unsafe conditions are the way in which the vulnerability of a population to a
specifi c hazard is expressed. In Haiti, the lack of enforced building codes manifest
in the unsafe condition in which most homes were constructed of heavy walls of
concrete blocks or of adobe bricks. They typically lacked a solid foundation or rein-
forcement and were highly susceptible to damage from shaking. In contrast, most
4 The Education Index is calculated using the adult literacy rate and the primary, secondary, and
tertiary enrolment ratios of a country. It is one of three indices used by the UN to calculate the
Human Development Index. The other two are the GDP Index and the Life Expectancy Index.