The Beach With Bob Marley’s Name: How Q2 2019 Crystallised Jamaica’s Most Charged Coastal Access Dispute

Briefing

• Restrictions on public access to the beach near Bob Marley’s Nine Mile birthplace drew national coverage.
• Coral bleaching surveys showed significant mortality on monitored Jamaica reef sites.
• JaBBEM formally announced its legal strategy, naming Bob Marley Beach as a primary case.
• Harmony Cove’s EIA was submitted to NEPA, triggering a formal public comment period.
• Negril Environmental Protection Trust documented continued beach narrowing at Seven Mile Beach.

There is something particular about the weight a name carries in a dispute. The beach near Nine Mile in St Ann had been used by local residents for years before it became associated, in public advocacy and media coverage, with the man whose childhood home was a few kilometres up the hill. Bob Marley’s music is, for many people in Jamaica and far beyond, the sound of freedom, of resistance, of the right to exist on one’s own terms. When the beach near his birthplace became inaccessible to the community that had always used it, the symbolism was irresistible to everyone who needed a way to make the abstract argument about beach rights concrete and personal.

Through April and May 2019, coverage of the Bob Marley Beach dispute amplified JaBBEM’s campaign significantly. Community members spoke to journalists about their experience of arriving at the beach and being turned away. Social media carried footage of the gate and the signage. The story was one that people far from Jamaica could understand: a community’s beach, named after its most famous son, inaccessible to the community that was supposed to have inherited his legacy.

The Reef Survey Results

In the same quarter, coral reef surveys conducted by University of the West Indies researchers and partner organisations documented continued decline in live coral cover at monitored sites around Jamaica’s coast. The surveys recorded bleaching damage from elevated sea surface temperatures in early 2019, and noted that recovery between successive bleaching events was becoming slower and less complete as the interval between events shortened. Some reef sites that had maintained moderate coral cover through previous bleaching episodes were showing sustained post-bleaching mortality that was not reversing on the timescales the researchers had previously observed.

The reef data mattered for the beach access debate in a way that was not always made explicit: healthy reefs produce the sand that maintains beaches. As reef health declines, the biological production of carbonate sand that replenishes Jamaica’s sandy beaches also declines. The erosion problem at Negril’s Seven Mile Beach, documented in a NEPA-commissioned survey in the quarter, was in part a consequence of the reef degradation that had been proceeding for decades. The beach narrowing that Negril residents and resort operators were observing in 2019 was not new; it was the cumulative result of fifty years of reef decline, coastal construction, and sand extraction.

Harmony Cove EIA

The Environmental Impact Assessment for the Harmony Cove resort development in Trelawny — a US$1 billion project covering more than 2,000 acres of north coast land at a site in Duncans Bay — was formally submitted to NEPA in Q2 2019, triggering the mandatory public comment period. Environmental advocates submitted detailed responses raising concerns about the project’s potential impact on the coastal wetlands, mangrove areas, and coral reef communities in and around the development site. The scale of the project, and the ecological sensitivity of the site it proposed to occupy, made it the most significant EIA submission of the year and one of the most consequential coastal development approvals in Jamaica’s recent history.

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