Nowhere Left to Go: Jamaica’s Coastal Communities Facing Climate Displacement and the Limits of Managed Retreat

Briefing

• Sea levels around Jamaica are rising at approximately 2-3mm per year, accelerating in recent decades.
• Storm surge damage from Hurricane Beryl (2024) inundated low-lying coastal homes in St Elizabeth.
• No formal managed retreat policy exists in Jamaica’s coastal planning framework.
• Communities in low-lying coastal areas have been rebuilding in place after successive flood events.
• NaRRA (2026) introduced post-Melissa reconstruction standards but not a proactive displacement framework.

The village of Old Harbour Bay sits on a low spit of land on Jamaica’s south coast where the land barely rises above sea level. It has been a fishing community for generations. Its residents’ relationship with the sea is the condition of their economic existence and the organising principle of their community life. It is also, increasingly, the source of an existential threat that no amount of cultural connection or economic dependency can neutralise: the sea is rising, and the land they live on is running out of margin.

Old Harbour Bay is one of dozens of Jamaican coastal communities — concentrated on the south coast but found around the island’s perimeter — where the combination of sea level rise, increased storm intensity, coastal erosion, and disappearing beaches is making the existing settlement pattern progressively less tenable. For residents and policymakers, the question is not whether this situation will require a response. It is what kind of response is feasible, who bears the cost, and what happens to communities whose livelihoods are tied to the specific coast they can no longer safely inhabit.

The Physical Picture

Sea level around Jamaica has been rising at approximately two to three millimetres per year over recent decades, a rate that, compounded over the remainder of this century, produces significant implications for low-lying coastal areas. More immediately damaging than mean sea level rise are the storm surge events that accompany major tropical systems. Hurricane Beryl’s track across Jamaica’s south coast in July 2024 produced storm surges that inundated homes and destroyed infrastructure at Treasure Beach, Alligator Pond, and coastal settlements in St Elizabeth that had been damaged by previous storms and rebuilt in the same locations, in the same configurations, because the people who lived there had nowhere else to go and no resources to go there with.

What Managed Retreat Would Require

Managed retreat — the deliberate, planned relocation of communities and infrastructure from areas that can no longer be defended against coastal hazards — is the policy framework that coastal risk management experts recommend for situations where protection is not cost-effective and adaptation in place is not sustainable. It is also, in practice, extraordinarily difficult to implement. It requires compensation for property left behind, alternative land and housing in acceptable locations, support for the reconstitution of community and livelihood in new settings, and the political will to make these investments and enforce restrictions on rebuilding in hazardous zones.

Jamaica has none of the institutional machinery for managed retreat in anything like the form these requirements demand. The National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority established following Hurricane Melissa in 2026 has introduced stronger building codes for coastal reconstruction and created a framework for post-disaster rebuilding that is intended to be more risk-aware than what preceded it. It has not created the proactive, pre-disaster displacement and support framework that genuine managed retreat requires.

The Equity Dimension

The communities most exposed to coastal climate risk in Jamaica are not the wealthiest coastal residents. They are, predominantly, fishing communities, agricultural workers, and families whose low incomes and limited alternatives have placed them at the coast’s most vulnerable edges. The people who own resort properties and luxury villas on Jamaica’s coast have resources to adapt, rebuild, and if necessary relocate. The people who live in wooden houses on low spits of land above Old Harbour Bay or at the margins of Treasure Beach have none of these options. Climate displacement in Jamaica, as everywhere, falls most heavily on those least equipped to manage it. That structural inequity is as much a policy challenge as the engineering of seawalls and the logistics of relocation.

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