Investment Confidence Returns: Q1 2015 and the Tourist Boom That Was Reshaping Jamaica’s Coast Faster Than Anyone Was Governing It

Briefing

• Jamaica’s 2014 tourism arrivals were confirmed at 2.08 million stopover visitors, a new record.
• Hotel investment commitments for 2015–18 totalled over US$1 billion across multiple projects.
• Coastal land acquisition by development interests in north coast parishes was accelerating.
• A UWI study documented continued reef decline at all seven long-term monitoring sites.
• Portland Bight received a UNESCO designation as a biosphere reserve in January 2015.

The annual Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association conference in January 2015 opened with the confirmation of a figure that the industry had been building toward for years: 2.08 million stopover visitors in 2014, the highest in Jamaica’s history. The record was achieved against a backdrop of economic headwinds — the global recovery from the 2008 financial crisis had been slower than expected, and Jamaica’s own fiscal position had required the kind of austerity management that reduced domestic discretionary spending. The tourism record was both a genuine achievement and a reminder of the sector’s importance: in an economy managing debt and structural adjustment, a growing tourism industry was one of the few reliable generators of foreign exchange.

The investment commitments that followed the record announcement were substantial. Hotel operators and developers who had been cautious since 2008 were now committing to Jamaica in numbers that hadn’t been seen since the pre-crisis boom. The north coast parishes — St Ann, Trelawny, Hanover — were the focus of the pipeline, and coastal land in those parishes was being acquired, optioned, and valued at rates that reflected the investment confidence the tourism numbers were generating.

Portland Bight Biosphere

A different kind of coastal story arrived in January 2015: UNESCO’s formal designation of the Portland Bight area as a biosphere reserve. The designation recognised the ecological significance of Jamaica’s largest protected coastal area — its mangroves, reef systems, seagrass beds, and the human communities that had lived in relationship with them for generations. For the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation, the designation was a validation of its work and a potential source of international profile and associated funding. For the communities of Alligator Pond, Old Harbour Bay, and the Portland Bight fishing villages, it was formal recognition that the coast they lived on was internationally significant.

Reef Monitoring’s Consistent Finding

The University of the West Indies reef monitoring report published in Q1 2015 documented continued decline at all seven long-term monitoring sites around Jamaica’s coast. The consistent finding across the monitoring programme, which had been running since the 1990s, was a trajectory from which no site had substantially diverged: periodic partial recovery, followed by further decline, with the overall direction consistently downward from the historical baseline. The trajectory was a product of multiple interacting stressors — bleaching, overfishing, sedimentation, algal overgrowth — none of which had been adequately addressed by Jamaica’s marine management policies. The report’s authors noted that the reef cover levels they were documenting were approaching the threshold below which reef systems lose the structural integrity that supports the biodiversity and ecological function they provide.

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