The Reef and the Room Rate: Q1 2008 and Jamaica’s Ecology-Economy Bargain

Briefing

• Jamaica tourism sector posted record stopover arrivals in Q1 2008.
• Reef monitoring showed continued decline in coral cover at north coast survey sites.
• New resort developments receiving approvals with standard access and environmental conditions.
• Hotel industry argued environmental regulation was proportionate to importance of sector.
• Independent economists questioned whether boom-era growth was environmentally sustainable.

The record stopover arrival figures that Jamaica’s tourism sector was reporting in early 2008 were the headline measure of a boom that had been building for four years. They represented the output of a system of hotel investment, airlift development, destination marketing, and industry infrastructure that had been constructed over decades, and they vindicated, in economic terms, the development choices that had produced the north coast resort belt that generated most of those arrivals. The room rate premiums that Jamaican resorts were commanding in the international market reflected the quality of the beach environment they offered: the white sand, the clear water, the proximity to reef dive sites. The economics of the boom, in other words, were directly dependent on the environmental assets that the boom was degrading.

The reef monitoring data that scientists published in early 2008 documented a paradox that was built into the boom’s logic. The north coast reefs that generated the sand for north coast beaches and that provided the dive and snorkel attractions that distinguished Jamaica’s resort offer from its competitors were, in the scientific monitoring data, continuing to decline. Coral cover at the north coast survey sites had been declining for years, reflecting the combined effects of thermal stress, overfishing, sediment and nutrient loading from coastal development, and the direct physical disturbance of construction and anchor damage. The environmental assets that the tourism economy was selling were being consumed by the process of generating the revenue from selling them.

The Industry’s Environmental Position

The hotel industry’s position in early 2008 was that it was subject to proportionate environmental regulation and that its environmental compliance obligations were being met. The EIA requirements, the access corridor conditions, the wastewater treatment specifications — these were, from the industry’s perspective, evidence of a functioning regulatory system that was managing environmental impacts appropriately. The countervailing argument — that the corridor conditions were not being complied with, that the EIA post-approval monitoring was inadequate, and that the cumulative environmental impacts were not captured by individual site assessments — was being made by advocates and scientists who were not well represented in the conversations that shaped policy in the boom’s peak year.

The Economists’ Question

The independent economists who were questioning the environmental sustainability of boom-era growth were raising a question that was structurally important but politically inconvenient in 2008. The question was simple: if the tourism product that Jamaica was selling was dependent on environmental assets — beaches, reefs, coastal scenery — and if the process of building the accommodation capacity to sell that product was degrading those assets, what was the long-term trajectory of the value being created? A resort built on a beach that it narrowed by its construction, fronting a reef that it damaged by its wastewater, was a business that was consuming its own feedstock. The economics could only be sustained if the environmental degradation could be arrested or reversed, and the evidence of 2008 was that neither was occurring.

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