Measuring What’s Left: Q4 2015’s Beach Surveys, Tourism Records, and the Erosion Nobody Was Counting in the Investment Numbers

Briefing

• Jamaica’s 2015 stopover arrivals were tracking toward 2.1 million, a record.
• A published survey documented Negril’s Seven Mile Beach losing an average of 1.2 metres annually.
• Sargassum inundation continued at reduced levels compared to the peak 2014 season.
• The Harmony Cove development concept was presented to the Jamaica Tourist Board investment committee.
• Environmental advocates submitted a formal request for a coastal zone management law by end of 2016.

The final quarter of 2015 brought Jamaica’s tourism sector the record it had been building toward: annual stopover arrivals tracking toward 2.1 million, the highest in the island’s history. The Jamaica Tourist Board presented the numbers in October with justifiable satisfaction; the work of positioning Jamaica as a premium Caribbean destination was producing measurable results, and the investment pipeline that the government had been building was beginning to deliver new room supply that would sustain the growth trajectory into the coming years.

In the same quarter, a survey of Negril’s Seven Mile Beach published by coastal geomorphologists documented an average annual erosion rate of 1.2 metres at monitored cross-sections along the beach. The figure was consistent with earlier studies and part of a long-term trend that had seen the beach lose more than 23 metres in total width at some locations since the 1960s. The beach that anchored Jamaica’s most recognisable resort destination was continuing to retreat. It was not doing so dramatically or catastrophically in any given quarter; it was doing so consistently and measurably, at a pace that, on a fifty-year horizon, described a beach significantly diminished from the one that made Negril’s reputation.

Harmony Cove Advances

The Harmony Cove development concept, which proposed to transform a large section of undeveloped Trelawny coastline into a major integrated resort destination, was presented to the Jamaica Tourist Board’s investment committee in Q4 2015. The presentation described a phased development over fifteen or more years that would eventually represent one of the largest coastal development projects in Caribbean history. The JTB’s response was broadly supportive of the project’s tourism economics. The environmental questions — how the development of 2,000-plus acres of north coast land would affect the coastal wetlands, reef systems, and fishing communities in and around the site — were identified as matters for the EIA process to address.

Advocates’ Legislative Demand

An open letter submitted to the government in December 2015 by a coalition of environmental and community advocacy organisations formally demanded the introduction of comprehensive coastal zone management legislation by the end of 2016. The letter set out the case for integrated coastal management: the inadequacy of the Beach Control Act, the fragmentation of the regulatory system, the absence of cumulative impact assessment, and the systematic exclusion of communities from decisions about the coast they depended on. The letter received a formal acknowledgement. It did not receive a commitment to the timeline it requested. The decade would end without the legislation being introduced.

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