Interview: Haiti's environmental reporters
What is it like to cover the environment when politics, poverty and football dominate the headlines? We talk to Patrick Saint-Pre, co-founder of the Haiti Climat news agency.
Patrick Saint-Pre is a Haitian journalist and co-founder of Haiti Climat, the country's first environmental news agency. The reporters of Haiti Climat have trekked the country covering mangrove destruction, plastic recycling, deforestation, clean energy, sea level rise.
In a tiny resource-contrained country those are urgent issues. But in this interview with Studio Canek's Conrad Fox, Patrick explains how difficult it has been to interest editors... and that's before the current spiral of violence forced other concerns from the front page. He talks about the innovative techniques they've found to engage audience interest, including a project to train journalists in coastal resilience with the help of Studio Canek.
He also talks about his recent trip to the COP27 in Egypt. There, rich countries agreed to compensate poor countries like his own for climate damage. Will they follow through? In answer, he makes a parallel between global climate negotiations and the state of Haiti today.
