Millennium Coast: Q1 2000 and Jamaica’s Coastal Development at the Turn of the Century

Briefing

• Jamaica’s north coast entered 2000 with significantly more resort density than 1990.
• Portland Bight Protected Area designated in 1999; management planning beginning.
• NRCA/Town and Country Planning merger into NEPA pending in 2000.
• Tourist arrivals had recovered from Hurricane Gilbert and were at decade highs.
• New development applications indicating continued expansion pressure on coastal land.

The turn of the millennium arrived in Jamaica with the north coast tourism corridor substantially more built up than it had been a decade earlier. The resort construction that had characterised the 1990s had added room inventory at major destinations including Montego Bay, Ocho Rios, Negril, and Runaway Bay; the all-inclusive format that had been pioneered in Jamaica in the 1980s had become the dominant model of Jamaican beach tourism, and properties operating under the format had expanded both in number and in individual scale. The coastline that tourists and Jamaicans encountered at the beginning of 2000 was a fundamentally different built environment from the one that had existed at the beginning of 1990.

The institutional framework within which this transformation had occurred was in flux. The Natural Resources Conservation Authority, which had administered the environmental impact assessment process since 1991, was in the process of being merged with the Town and Country Planning Authority to create the National Environment and Planning Agency. The Portland Bight Protected Area, designated in 1999, was Jamaica’s largest new protected area and a significant commitment to conservation of the island’s remaining substantial mangrove and coastal wetland systems on the south coast. The Negril Environmental Protection Area, established in the early 1990s, was now nearly a decade old and its management experience was informing how newer protected areas would be approached.

The Decade in Review

A review of the 1990s from the perspective of coastal access would have shown a decade of substantial loss. The expansion of resort development along the north coast had been accompanied by a reduction in the number and quality of publicly accessible beaches, the narrowing of access corridors where they existed, and the effective privatisation of substantial stretches of coastline that Jamaicans had previously used freely. The legal framework — the Beach Control Act, the EIA conditions system, the public access reservation requirements — had been present throughout the decade but had not been enforced with sufficient consistency to prevent the access losses that had accumulated.

For coastal advocates entering 2000, the challenge was whether the new institutional arrangements being established — NEPA, an expanding protected areas network, the beginnings of integrated coastal zone management — would produce better outcomes in the decade ahead than the 1990s framework had produced in the decade just ending.

Related: Property Market Analysis | NEPA Jamaica

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