Briefing
- Hurricane Beryl strikes Jamaica as Category 4 on July 3-4, 2024.
- South coast, including St Elizabeth and Treasure Beach, bears the brunt of storm surge.
- Beryl’s early-season intensity is attributed to record warm sea surface temperatures.
- BREDS Foundation coordinates community recovery on the ground at Treasure Beach.
- Storm damages underscore inadequacy of coastal housing standards for climate adaptation.
Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Jamaica on the 3rd and 4th of July 2024, arriving as a Category 4 storm with winds in excess of 215 kilometres per hour and a storm surge that swept well inland at exposed south coast locations. It was, at the time, the earliest Category 4 Atlantic hurricane on record, its formation and intensification in record-warm Caribbean waters a marker of the climate trajectory that Jamaican officials and scientists had been warning about for years. The north coast resort corridor, protected somewhat by the island’s topography, sustained significant but manageable damage. The south coast, exposed to the open Caribbean, was hit harder.
At Treasure Beach in St Elizabeth — a community of several small fishing villages strung along a stretch of bay on Jamaica’s south-western coast — the damage was severe. Storm surge breached the foreshore at multiple points. Low-lying structures near the beach were flooded. Fishing boats were damaged or destroyed. The roads that connect the villages to each other and to the main road were washed out in several places. The BREDS Foundation, the community NGO that has managed Treasure Beach’s sustainable tourism model for many years, shifted immediately to emergency response mode, coordinating distribution of food and water, assessments of household damage, and communication with government recovery agencies.
What Treasure Beach Represents
Treasure Beach is Jamaica’s most celebrated example of community-managed sustainable coastal tourism. Unlike the north coast’s all-inclusive resort model, Treasure Beach is built around small guesthouses, local restaurants, community-run water sports, and an ethos of visitor engagement with the authentic character of a Jamaican fishing community. The BREDS Foundation has been the institutional backbone of this model, managing environmental initiatives, community development projects, and the governance of tourism in the area in a way that keeps the economic benefit within the community rather than directing it to international chains.
That model is ecologically as well as economically distinctive. Treasure Beach has maintained coastal vegetation, has resisted large-scale development, and has an environmental consciousness built into its community institutions that is unusual on Jamaica’s south coast. It is, in various respects, a working demonstration of the alternative to the all-inclusive resort model that advocates across Jamaica have argued for.
The Climate Vulnerability
Beryl’s damage at Treasure Beach illustrated the uncomfortable reality that community-centred, ecologically conscious coastal tourism cannot, by itself, make a coastal settlement safe from the physical forces that climate change is intensifying. The BREDS Foundation’s environmental work had maintained the natural coastal buffers that reduce wave energy — the vegetation, the beach profile, the absence of hard structures that would redirect wave energy onto neighbouring properties — and that work genuinely reduced the extent of the damage relative to what it might have been on a more developed section of coast. But it could not prevent a Category 4 storm surge from flooding a low-lying beach community in the path of a major hurricane.
The lesson the advocates drew was not that sustainable tourism had failed. It was that sustainable tourism, climate adaptation, and coastal policy reform were all necessary and mutually reinforcing, and that none of them was sufficient without the others. Treasure Beach recovered, as it always had. The question the community and its supporters were asking, in the aftermath of Beryl, was how many recoveries the community could sustain before the accumulation of climate damage outpaced the community’s capacity to rebuild.
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