The report A History of Landscape-level Land Management Efforts in Haiti is a product of the Agriculture Global Practice of the World Bank. The initial draft of the report was prepared under an activity led by Pierre Olivier Colleye and was intended as background information for government consultations conducted in May, 2015. The authors would like to thank the participants of this workshop, including the Ministry of Agriculture (MARNDR), for their valuable inputs. The final report considers feedback from this workshop, as well as comments from multiple experts across various institutions. The authors would like to thank the 6 FIGURE 5. An Early Grouping of Watersheds Adapted by Arrondissements and Divided into Seven Principal Areas FIGURE 6. Watershed Prioritization Map for Project Interventions, Haiti FIGURE 7. Watersheds of Haiti, According to the Ministère de l'Environnement FIGURE 8. Current MdE Map (Right) Ostensibly Based on 1972 OAS Grouping (Left)

Woodfuels constitute nearly 80% of Haiti's primary energy supply. Forests are severely degraded and the nation has long been considered an archetypal case of woodfuel-driven deforestation. However, there is little empirical evidence that woodfuel demand directly contributes to deforestation, but may contribute to degradation. We use MoFuSS (Modeling Fuelwood Sustainability Scenarios), a dynamic landscape model, to assess whether current woodfuel demand is as impactful as it is often depicted by simulating changes in land cover that would result if current demand continues unabated. We also simulate several near-term interventions focused on woodfuel demand reduction to analyze the land cover impacts of different energy trajectories. We find that current demand may contribute to moderate levels of degradation, but it is not as severe as is typically portrayed. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the simulated regenerative capacity of woody biomass is insufficient to meet Haiti's increasing demand for wood energy and, as a result, between 2017 and 2027 stocks of above-ground (woody) biomass could decline by 4% ± 1%. This is an annual loss of 302 ± 29 kton of wood and would emit 555 ± 54 kton CO 2 yr −1 . Aggressive interventions to reduce woodfuel demand could slow or even reverse woodfuel-driven degradation, allowing woody biomass to recover in some regions. We discuss the policy implications and propose steps to reduce uncertainty and validate the model.

Trees are an important dwelling place for the spirits of the Vodou pantheon. I describe arboreal rituals dedicated to the veneration of tree-residing spirits, taboos against cutting sacred trees, con?icting taboos against planting certain trees, and a ceremony for removing a spirit from one tree and placing it in another. After discussing common folk beliefs about particular tree species, and examining associations between these species and individual spirits, I suggest that a rapid decrease of trees in Haiti mandated the ceremony for removing a spirit from a tree and placing it somewhere else. Consequently, as tree diversity dwindled into the handful of primary species utilized in rural Haiti today, a large pantheon of spirits had to be funneled into an increasingly limited number of trees. Accordingly, Vodou practitioners had to facilitate spirit ?exibility with regard to which trees they inhabit.

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