The Pause and Its Possibilities: Q1 2010 and Jamaica’s Post-Crash Coastal Reset

Briefing

• Hotel development application volumes at decade-low as financial crisis hit investment.
• NEPA used reduced workload to conduct internal review of coastal assessment processes.
• Tourism ministry commenced access corridor compliance audit deferred since 2007.
• Conservation organisations published 10-year coastal monitoring review with mixed findings.

The quiet of early 2010 on Jamaica’s north coast development front was relative rather than absolute — construction continued on projects that had been too far advanced when the crisis hit to be suspended, and planning applications continued to be filed for projects whose developers were betting on a recovery that would materialise before the approvals expired. But the pace was dramatically reduced from the boom years, and the regulatory agencies that had been under intense pressure from 2004 to 2008 were experiencing something they had not seen in several years: a workload that was actually manageable.

NEPA’s internal review of coastal assessment processes, initiated in the reduced-pressure conditions of late 2009 and continuing into 2010, was an attempt to use the pause productively. The review examined the Environmental Impact Assessment process for coastal resort developments from application submission through post-approval monitoring, identifying the points in the process where the gap between regulatory intent and regulatory outcome was largest. Its findings were used in preparing the revised guidelines that would eventually be issued in 2012. The review was not publicly released, but its general thrust — that the post-approval monitoring and conditions enforcement stage was where the process was most comprehensively failing — was consistent with what external observers had been arguing for years.

The Access Corridor Audit

The tourism ministry’s commencement of the access corridor compliance audit that had been discussed and deferred since 2007 was a more politically significant development. The audit, which involved physical inspection of the access corridors specified in development approvals across the resort belt, was designed to produce a definitive inventory of which corridors existed in usable form, which existed in name only, and which were simply absent. The findings, when they eventually became available in late 2010 and early 2011, confirmed what advocates had been asserting: the majority of the corridors specified in approvals were not accessible to the public in any meaningful sense. The audit did not itself produce enforcement action — that remained a political decision — but it provided an evidentiary foundation for enforcement that had not previously existed in formally documented form.

The Ten-Year Review

The ten-year coastal monitoring review that conservation organisations published in early 2010 drew on a decade of field data to assess the overall trajectory of Jamaica’s coastal environment from 2000 to 2010. The findings were mixed in the sense that not everything had deteriorated — some reef sites had shown recovery, some mangrove areas had been successfully protected, and some pollution metrics had improved in certain embayments as land-based sources had been addressed. But the dominant trajectory of the decade was negative: net beach loss, degraded water quality in resort embayments, reduced coral cover, declining fisheries, and diminished public access. The report was a sober accounting of what the decade’s development activity had produced in environmental terms, and it would serve as a baseline reference for the assessments that followed in the recovery period.

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