770 Hectares Gone: Jamaica’s Mangrove Crisis and What the Loss of Its Green Coastal Walls Means for the Whole Island

Briefing

• Jamaica lost over 770 hectares of mangrove between 1996 and 2006; losses have continued since.
• Mangroves provide coastal protection, fisheries nursery habitat, carbon storage, and water filtration.
• The Portland Bight Protected Area contains Jamaica’s largest remaining mangrove forest.
• Pew Charitable Trusts and NEPA have begun detailed seagrass and mangrove mapping since 2023.
• Mangrove restoration is technically feasible but requires sustained, site-specific investment and monitoring.

Stand in any mangrove forest along Jamaica’s coast — in the Portland Bight, around Kingston Harbour, at the edges of the Great Morass near Negril — and the density of life is immediately apparent. The prop roots of the red mangrove descend into the brackish water and provide shelter for juvenile fish, lobster, and shrimp. Wading birds nest in the canopy. The tangled root system filters sediment and nutrients from the water that flows through it before they reach the nearshore reef. The trees themselves are extraordinary carbon stores, sequestering not just the carbon in their living wood but enormous quantities of “blue carbon” in the waterlogged sediments their roots stabilise.

These are not marginal ecosystem services. They are the reason Jamaica’s coastal fisheries, coastal water quality, and coastal storm protection have functioned as well as they have for as long as they have. And they are the reason that the documented loss of more than 770 hectares of Jamaican mangrove between 1996 and 2006 — a figure from forestry department assessments of that period — is so consequential. That loss did not stop in 2006.

The Causes of Loss

Mangrove clearance in Jamaica has multiple drivers. Coastal resort development is the most visible: the conversion of mangrove-fringed shoreline to beach resort involves the physical removal of the mangrove forest and the dredging or filling of the shallow water habitat beneath it. Several of Jamaica’s major resort complexes were built on what were previously mangrove areas. The environmental impact assessments that preceded their approval recorded the mangrove loss; the approvals proceeded anyway.

Aquaculture development, particularly shrimp farming, has historically involved mangrove clearance in Jamaica and across the wider Caribbean. Urban expansion along the Kingston Harbour foreshore and in coastal parishes has cleared mangrove for residential and industrial development. Charcoal production from mangrove wood, illegal but practiced, has degraded mangrove areas in some parishes. And climate-related stressors — sea level rise, increased storm damage, changing salinity regimes — are killing mangroves in areas where human activity has already compromised their resilience.

Portland Bight: The Last Large Stand

The Portland Bight Protected Area, managed by the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation (C-CAM), contains Jamaica’s largest remaining mangrove forest. The protected area designation provides some legal protection, but the boundaries of what is formally protected and what is actively enforced are not identical, and pressures from fishing, agriculture, and development on the protected area’s terrestrial margins continue to test C-CAM’s management capacity. The mangroves within Portland Bight represent an irreplaceable national asset, and their protection is correspondingly a national priority that the resources allocated to C-CAM have not always matched.

Restoration and What It Requires

The Pew Charitable Trusts, working with NEPA and local partners, has been engaged in detailed mapping of Jamaica’s remaining mangrove and seagrass habitats since 2023. Accurate mapping is a prerequisite for effective restoration planning: without knowing where mangrove has been lost, in what condition the remaining forest is, and what hydrological conditions exist at potential restoration sites, restoration planting is frequently unsuccessful. Pew’s work is providing the baseline data that has previously been absent.

Mangrove restoration is technically feasible: seedling propagation, site preparation, and monitoring protocols are well-established. What it requires that is currently missing is the sustained, multi-year funding commitment and the site-by-site hydrological assessment to determine where restoration is viable. Planting mangroves in areas where the conditions that caused their loss have not been addressed — altered salinity, blocked water flow, continued sedimentation — produces poor outcomes. Successful restoration requires addressing causes, not just replanting trees.

In the context of Jamaica’s climate commitments and the growing recognition that ecosystem-based adaptation — restoring the natural systems that buffer communities against storm and flood — is more cost-effective than hard coastal engineering, the case for substantial public investment in mangrove restoration has never been stronger. The case has not yet been matched by the resources.

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