The Season the Caribbean Burned: Q3 2017’s Mass Bleaching and What It Meant for Jamaica’s Coastal Economy

Briefing

• Sea surface temperatures exceeded bleaching thresholds on Jamaica’s north coast reefs in August 2017.
• The 2017 bleaching event followed 2016’s catastrophic global episode; recovery was incomplete.
• Tourism peak season occupied the coast at maximum intensity as reef stress peaked simultaneously.
• Sargassum inundation on north coast beaches generated tourism operator complaints.
• Hurricane Harvey struck Texas in August; the Caribbean monitored the active season closely.

The summer of 2017 arrived while Jamaica’s reefs were still recovering from the global mass bleaching event of the previous year — the third most extensive bleaching episode on record at the time, which had affected reef systems across the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. Recovery from bleaching requires a return of sea temperatures to normal levels and a period of relative calm; what Jamaica’s reefs got instead was another summer of elevated temperatures that pushed multiple sites back toward bleaching threshold before they had adequately recovered from the previous event.

The monitoring data that reef scientists were collecting through August 2017 documented bleaching at sites that had shown partial recovery earlier in the year. The cumulative picture was of reef systems experiencing thermal stress at a frequency that the biological processes of coral recovery could not keep pace with. A reef that bleaches every two years and has limited recovery time between events is in a structurally different position than one that bleaches every decade and has years of calm between events to rebuild. The reefs Jamaica’s tourism industry was marketing were increasingly the former rather than the latter.

Tourism at Peak Load

The irony of the summer of 2017 was that precisely when Jamaica’s reef systems were under maximum ecological stress, the tourism season was placing them under maximum human pressure as well. July and August brought the peak of the family travel market, the highest occupancies in Jamaica’s resort calendar, and the heaviest volume of snorkelling, diving, glass-bottom boat operations, and watercraft activity over the reefs that were simultaneously experiencing thermal stress. Reef management guidelines that tourism operators were encouraged to follow — mooring buoy use, no-anchor zones, restricted boat traffic in sensitive areas — were more or less observed depending on the operator, but the aggregate human pressure on Jamaica’s reefs during peak summer was inconsistent with any scenario of accelerated reef recovery.

The Long-Term Calculation

Marine ecologists and tourism economists who had begun working together on reef-dependent tourism sustainability in the Caribbean were, by 2017, producing a body of research that addressed a simple but consequential question: what happens to the tourism value of a reef-destination when the reef is gone? The modelling suggested that the answer was a significant and relatively rapid decline in visitor interest, spend, and arrivals at destinations whose tourism product was substantially reef-dependent. Jamaica, which had been marketing its reefs and clear water as central to its tourism identity for decades, had a material interest in that question. The answer it was heading toward, on the trajectory its reef monitoring data described, was not the answer its tourism projections assumed.

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