The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season added weather-related displacement and damage to the already overwhelming humanitarian situation in Haiti, with tropical storms and hurricanes affecting coastal communities and mountainous areas that had been identified as particularly vulnerable to climate-related extreme weather events. The storms struck communities that had already exhausted their resilience through years of political crisis, gang violence, and economic collapse.
Coastal communities in the south and southwest, still recovering from the August 2021 earthquake, were particularly vulnerable to storm surge and flooding. Areas where communities had rebuilt temporary structures after the earthquake found those structures vulnerable to storm damage that more permanent housing might have better withstood. The combination of incomplete earthquake recovery and new storm damage created compounding displacement that some families were experiencing for the third or fourth time in a few years.
Haiti’s early warning system, while improved from previous years, still had significant gaps in reaching the most remote communities. Local civil protection authorities who were supposed to coordinate evacuation and emergency response faced the same resource constraints and institutional weaknesses that affected every government function. International humanitarian organizations that would normally surge capacity for weather emergencies were already operating at maximum stretch on the ongoing gang violence and displacement crisis.
Climate scientists noted that the vulnerability of Haitian communities to weather events was not independent of the other crises the country faced but was amplified by them. Families living in displacement sites were more exposed to flooding than those in permanent housing. Communities whose agricultural livelihoods had been disrupted by gang violence had less resilience to weather-related crop losses. The connections between Haiti’s multiple crises meant that addressing any one of them in isolation was insufficient.