Portland Bight Designated: Q4 1999 and Jamaica’s Conservation Counter-Move

Briefing

• Portland Bight Protected Area gazetted in 1999 — Jamaica’s largest coastal conservation area.
• 187,000 acres encompassing mangroves, seagrass, coral reef, and coastal wetlands.
• Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation to lead management planning.
• Fishing communities within the PA area engaged in consultation process.
• Designation seen as model for future coastal protected areas in Jamaica.

The gazettal of the Portland Bight Protected Area in the closing months of 1999 was the most substantial single coastal conservation action Jamaica had taken in the decade, and it came in a period when the north coast was experiencing an acceleration of resort development that was generating increasing concern about the cumulative state of the island’s coastal environment. The Portland Bight designation addressed a different coast — the south — and a different kind of resource than the north coast resort corridor was consuming, but its significance lay precisely in demonstrating that Jamaica’s government was capable of making substantive coastal conservation commitments when the ecological value was clear and the immediate development pressure less acute.

The area designated encompassed the largest remaining mangrove system in Jamaica, spread across the parishes of St. Catherine, Clarendon, and St. Elizabeth. Mangroves in Portland Bight had been documented by researchers as among the most structurally complex and ecologically productive in the Caribbean — a remnant of the mangrove coast that had historically fringed much of Jamaica’s south shore and had been progressively cleared for agriculture, urban development, and coastal infrastructure elsewhere. The Portland Bight system had survived in part because of its relative remoteness and in part because the economic conditions for large-scale south coast resort development had not materialised to the extent they had on the north coast.

The Management Challenge Ahead

The designation was the beginning of a long process rather than a resolution. The Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation, charged with developing the management plan for the Portland Bight PA, was beginning work on a consultation and planning process that would need to engage the multiple fishing communities distributed around the PA’s extensive boundaries, identify the specific management zones and regulations appropriate to different parts of the PA, and secure the funding necessary to sustain management operations over the long term. International conservation organisations and development finance institutions were engaged in supporting this process, bringing the resources and technical capacity that Jamaican government bodies could not independently provide.

The Portland Bight designation was read by environmental advocates as a demonstration that the policy system could respond to conservation arguments when they were made effectively. It was also read as creating an implicit standard: if a protected area of this scale was appropriate for Portland Bight, what justified the absence of comparable protection for the coral reefs, seagrass beds, and remaining mangroves of the north coast that were facing much more immediate development pressure?

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