Feeding the Beast: Q2 2007 and the Boom’s Insatiable Demand for Coastal Land

Briefing

• Development applications filed for Portland and Hanover coastal sites previously undisturbed.
• NEPA EIA pipeline reached record volumes as boom expanded beyond traditional resort corridor.
• Portland conservation groups raised concerns about Blue Lagoon and adjacent coastal ecosystems.
• Westmoreland coastal sites attracted interest from developers priced out of St Ann market.
• Critics warned cumulative impact assessments were failing to capture cross-parish effects.

The geographic expansion of Jamaica’s resort development boom in 2007 was a predictable consequence of the boom’s own success. The St Ann and Trelawny coastal sites that had been the boom’s early focus had been substantially committed: land prices had risen to levels that made development economics work only for the largest projects, and the remaining undeveloped sites in the traditional resort corridor were either subject to existing approvals, in active negotiation, or too small to support the scale of development that could justify the land cost. The boom’s appetite had, in other words, consumed the obvious inventory, and developers were looking to expand the territory.

The National Environment and Planning Agency‘s EIA pipeline reflected this geographic expansion. Applications were arriving for coastal sites in Hanover and Westmoreland parishes in the west, and for sites in Portland parish in the east, that had not previously been part of the development conversation. Portland in particular was receiving attention: its coastline was less developed than the St Ann corridor, land prices were lower, and the perceived natural quality of the environment — the Blue Lagoon, the Rio Grande valley, the relatively intact reef systems of the eastern north coast — was actually part of its market appeal. Developers were proposing to develop the very distinctiveness that made Portland attractive, which was a dynamic that Portland conservation advocates found alarming.

The Blue Lagoon Question

The Blue Lagoon at Port Antonio had been, since its appearance in a 1980 Brooke Shields film, one of Jamaica’s most recognisable natural landmarks and tourism attractions. Its ecosystem — a deep saltwater pool connected to the sea through a submerged channel, fed by freshwater springs, with distinctive temperature and salinity stratification — was ecologically unusual and scientifically interesting. Development proposals for the coastal properties adjacent to the Blue Lagoon raised the question of whether the hydrological conditions that sustained the lagoon’s character could survive the land use changes that coastal resort development involved. Portland conservation groups were emphatic that they could not, and that development in the watershed draining to the lagoon would alter the freshwater inputs that maintained its stratification.

The Cumulative Impact Gap

Critics who warned in 2007 that cumulative impact assessments were failing to capture cross-parish effects were making an argument about the structural design of Jamaica’s EIA system rather than about any specific application. The assessment system evaluated applications individually; the environmental conditions in any parish were assessed for applications in that parish; but the cumulative environmental load being imposed on Jamaica’s coastal ecosystems by the boom was a national phenomenon that no individual parish-level assessment captured. NEPA’s efforts to develop a coastal cumulative impact framework, which had been under discussion since at least 2004, had not produced an operational methodology by 2007, and the boom’s expansion into new parishes was proceeding without the benefit of that framework.

Related: Property Market Analysis | NEPA Jamaica

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