Briefing
- Multiple major resort projects broke ground simultaneously on Jamaica’s north coast.
- NEPA issued first comprehensive coastal construction monitoring report for boom-era projects.
- Communities adjacent to construction sites reported dust, runoff, and access disruption.
- Tourism arrivals and investment figures cited by government as validation of development strategy.
- Environmental advocates called for construction-phase monitoring to be independently verified.
The fourth quarter of 2004 was the quarter in which Jamaica’s resort development boom became unmistakably visible on the ground. The planning processes that had produced approvals through 2002 and 2003 had created a concentration of projects in the construction-ready stage, and several broke ground within months of each other. The north coast between Montego Bay and Ocho Rios, already extensively developed, was witnessing a new wave of construction at a scale that the corridor had not seen since the resort expansion of the 1980s. The construction fences, the earthmoving equipment, and the altered beach profiles at multiple simultaneous sites were transforming the visual character of the coast.
The communities adjacent to the construction sites were experiencing the boom in its least attractive form: the dust from site preparation blowing across residential areas; the construction runoff reaching nearshore waters during rain events; the heavy vehicle traffic on roads not designed for it; and the restriction of coastal access at sites where the construction perimeter had been drawn across public beach areas. The construction phase’s environmental conditions — the silt fences, the sediment controls, the restricted site access provisions that had been required in the approvals — were being implemented with varying degrees of rigour, and NEPA‘s first comprehensive construction monitoring report documented the compliance range from adequate to poor.
The Investment Narrative
The government’s use of tourism investment and arrival figures to validate the development strategy that the boom represented was politically understandable. The figures were genuinely positive: investment was flowing, construction employment was high, hotel openings were being announced, and Jamaica was getting international attention as a destination of choice. The development strategy appeared, in the terms that the government chose to measure it, to be working. The environmental and access costs that the strategy was imposing were not part of the metrics by which it was being evaluated, and the data that would have allowed them to be calculated — beach width trends, near-shore water quality, access corridor compliance rates — was not being compiled in a form that could easily be set against the investment figures.
The Monitoring Demand
Environmental advocates’ call for independent verification of construction-phase monitoring went beyond the question of whether specific projects were complying with their approval conditions. It was a structural argument about the integrity of the EIA process: if the environmental conditions that were supposed to mitigate construction impacts were not being independently verified during construction, the assurances that the EIA process had provided about those impacts were not worth the paper they were printed on. The advocate organisations that were making this argument were a coalition of civil society groups with limited resources and no compulsory access rights to construction sites. Their capacity to independently monitor was constrained by exactly the factors that made independent monitoring necessary.
Related: Property Market Analysis | NEPA Jamaica
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