Portland Bight Gets Its Name on the Map: Landmark Signage Gives Jamaica’s Largest Protected Area a Public Face

Briefing

• Portland Bight Protected Area covers 187,000 hectares of land and sea.
• Over 50,000 people live within its boundaries; 4,000+ depend on its fisheries.
• C-CAM installs landmark signage at key entrances to mark the protected zone.
• PBPA contains Jamaica’s largest remaining mangrove forest and pelican rookery.
• Boundary signage helps communities and developers understand what rules apply.

The Portland Bight Protected Area is an extraordinary place that most Jamaicans have never heard of. Declared a protected area in 1999, it covers approximately 187,000 hectares — about 184 square kilometres of land and 1,870 square kilometres of sea — spanning parts of St Catherine, Clarendon, and Manchester parishes on Jamaica’s south coast. It contains the island’s largest remaining mangrove forest, its most significant pelican rookery, critical sea turtle nesting beaches, extensive seagrass meadows, and a mosaic of dry limestone forest, wetland, and coastal habitat that supports extraordinary levels of biodiversity. It also contains more than 50,000 people, including the fishing communities of Portland Cottage, Alligator Pond, and dozens of smaller settlements whose livelihoods depend directly on the biological productivity of the waters within the protected area’s boundaries.

For the better part of its twenty-five years of legal existence, the Portland Bight Protected Area had almost no visible physical presence on the landscape. There were no signs at the boundaries indicating that you had entered a protected zone. There were no information boards explaining what a protected area is, what activities are regulated within it, or who manages it. The declaration existed as a designation in government records. It did not exist in any form that a fisherman, a tourist, a community resident, or a developer could encounter on the ground and understand its significance.

The Signage Campaign

In October 2024, the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation (C-CAM), the NGO that manages the Portland Bight Protected Area in partnership with the Jamaican government, installed a series of landmark signs at key access points and community entrances to the protected zone. The signs identified the area as a protected space, indicated its boundaries, and provided basic information about the management framework. A ceremony to mark the installation brought together community representatives, government officials from the National Environment and Planning Agency, and international supporters including representatives of the organisations that have funded C-CAM’s work over the years.

The occasion was modest by any external standard. But for the communities within the protected area, and for C-CAM’s staff and partners who had been working to build effective management of the zone since its declaration, it represented a meaningful step. Visibility matters in conservation. A protected area that is invisible to the people who live within and around it is, in a practical sense, only as well protected as the goodwill of those people and the enforcement capacity of the managing agency allow it to be.

What Is at Stake

The Portland Bight Protected Area is not a wilderness. It is a working landscape, in which tens of thousands of people farm, fish, extract materials, and build homes and businesses. The management challenge C-CAM faces is not keeping people out — that would be both impossible and unjust — but helping communities to use the area’s resources in ways that can be sustained over time. The mangroves that line the bay’s northern margins are essential to the fisheries that the communities depend on. If those mangroves are cleared for coastal development or agricultural expansion, the fish that shelter and feed in their root systems will decline, and the fishing livelihoods will decline with them.

That argument is well understood by C-CAM and by most of the communities it works with. Making it visible, literally and symbolically, through the installation of boundary signs, was a small but genuine contribution to the ongoing effort to build the protected area’s legitimacy in the eyes of the people whose cooperation its management ultimately requires. In a conservation landscape crowded with remote and abstract commitments, the act of putting a sign on a post that says, in plain language, where you are and what matters here, was worth noting.

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