Record Investment, Rising Alarms: Jamaica’s Tourism Boom and the Environmental Warnings Being Filed in Early 2019

Briefing

• Jamaica’s 2018 tourism arrivals were confirmed at 2.47 million stopover visitors, a record at the time.
• New hotel investments totalling over US$600 million were announced in the first quarter.
• NEPA’s environmental division flagged cumulative coastal impact concerns in internal reports.
• Portland Bight Protected Area management faced funding shortfalls limiting active monitoring.
• JaBBEM was formally constituted as an organisation in early 2019.

The annual Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association conference in January 2019 was a celebration of an industry performing at historic levels. The 2018 figures confirmed 2.47 million stopover arrivals, the highest in Jamaica’s history to that point, and the room investment pipeline for 2019 and beyond was substantial. International hotel brands were announcing Jamaica projects with a confidence that had not been seen since the pre-2008 boom, and government ministers speaking to the conference framed coastal development not merely as an economic strategy but as the economic strategy — the primary engine through which Jamaica would service its debt and employ its people.

The confidence was understandable. The numbers were real. What the conference hall’s optimism tended to obscure was a parallel set of figures — reef cover percentages, beach width measurements, mangrove acreage, fish biomass surveys — that described a coastal environment under cumulative pressure that was also producing real and measurable results, just not the kind that appeared in investment prospectuses.

The Regulatory Capacity Question

NEPA‘s capacity to review the volume of EIA submissions the coastal development boom was generating had been a subject of internal discussion within the agency for several years. The challenge was not the existence of the process but the resourcing of it: EIA review requires specialist staff with expertise in coastal ecology, marine science, hydrology, and related disciplines. NEPA’s staffing levels did not grow in proportion to the volume of complex coastal development applications being submitted. The result was a review process under pressure to produce outputs faster than the depth of analysis some applications warranted.

Environmental advocates who had studied the EIAs for several north coast resort projects raised specific concerns about the methodology used to assess impacts on coral reefs, seagrass beds, and mangrove systems. The assessments in some cases relied on baseline data that was years or decades old, and did not account for the pre-existing degraded state of the ecosystems they were assessing. An EIA that measures additional impact on a reef at 15 per cent live coral cover produces different conclusions than one that measures impact on a reef at 52 per cent cover. The starting point matters, and the starting point in 2019 was not the starting point of twenty years earlier.

JaBBEM Is Born

In the first weeks of 2019, the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement was formally constituted as an organised advocacy body. The founding brought together individuals who had been working on beach access issues at specific sites — Bob Marley Beach, Little Dunn’s River, Winnifred Beach — into a single organisational framework with a coherent legal strategy, a shared communications platform, and the capacity to coordinate action across multiple sites simultaneously. The name was deliberate: not a legal society, not an environmental NGO in the conventional mould, but a movement organised around a claim of birthright — the assertion that access to Jamaica’s coast is not a privilege to be licensed but a right that belongs to every Jamaican by virtue of their citizenship and their history.

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