The Last Applications: Q1 2009 and the End of Jamaica’s Coastal Development Boom

Briefing

• International financing for new resort developments effectively unavailable from late 2008.
• Development applications continued to be filed but construction commencements ceased.
• Several developers sought extensions on existing approvals that were nearing expiry.
• Portland Bight biosphere recognition had protected that coastline from boom-era development pressure.

The beginning of 2009 was, for Jamaica’s coastal development sector, the moment when the music stopped. The global financial crisis that had seized international credit markets in the autumn of 2008 had made the kind of international financing on which Jamaica’s major resort developments depended effectively unavailable. The large institutional lenders — the multilateral development banks, the regional development financing institutions, the international commercial banks that had been providing construction finance for Caribbean resort projects — were withdrawn from the market or requiring risk premiums that made deals impossible to structure.

The development applications that continued to be filed in early 2009 were mostly either applications for extension of existing approvals whose developers were hoping to wait out the crisis, or applications by smaller operators pursuing projects that might be viable on domestic or regional financing that had not completely dried up. The large-scale north coast resort projects that had characterised the boom were not being filed, and the ones that were in advanced planning stages had their timelines extended indefinitely. The planning agencies that had been working under the intense pressure of the boom-era application load found themselves, almost overnight, with a dramatically reduced workload and a correspondingly reduced political pressure to process applications quickly.

Portland Bight’s Different Story

The Portland Bight Protected Area’s story in the boom years was, in significant part, a story of what did not happen. The coastline that the biosphere reserve protected — mangrove forests, seagrass beds, the nursery habitats of the Pedro Bank fishery, the beaches and coastal communities of south-central Jamaica — had not been subject to the resort development pressure that had transformed the north coast, precisely because the biosphere designation had created a regulatory environment that made major resort development approval impractical. The fishing communities in the Portland Bight area had, consequently, a somewhat different relationship with their coastline in 2009 than the fishing communities of the north coast: the coast was still substantially intact, the access that fishers had used for generations was largely unobstructed, and the environmental baseline had not been altered by construction and seawall-building at the scale that had occurred on the north coast.

What Protection Had Preserved

The comparison between Portland Bight and the north coast resort corridor in 2009 was instructive about the value of the protection that the biosphere designation had provided. It was not that the Portland Bight coastline was unaffected by the environmental pressures that Jamaica’s coastal systems faced generally: overfishing was an issue, land-based pollution from agriculture reached the coastal waters, and sea level rise and climate change were threats that no biosphere designation could address. But the specific pressures of resort development — beach narrowing from seawall construction, access restriction from resort fencing, near-shore water quality degradation from resort wastewater — were absent. The protection had preserved something, and the comparison with what the north coast had become made visible what that something was.

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