Each September, thousands of Jamaicans wade into the sea to remove what the rest of the year puts there. The numbers have never been better. The underlying problem has never been larger.

From Priory in St Ann to Whitehouse in Westmoreland, fishing villages and farming communities along Jamaica’s coast are facing a convergence of threats that no single policy or project has yet been designed to address together.

Jamaica’s beaches have been ‘public’ since 1956 under the Beach Control Act. Yet generations of Jamaicans have been locked out of them. An explainer on what the Act says, why it has failed, and what replacing it would actually require.

Are you considering a move to Jamaica, captivated by its charm and potential for investment? If so, you’re not alone. The allure…

Negril’s Great Morass has been drying since the 1950s, fuelling recurring fires and degrading the reef and beach that the resort depends on. A US$13-million international restoration project launched in 2021 offers the most serious attempt yet to reverse decades of ecological damage.

January and February 2020 delivered some of Jamaica’s strongest tourism numbers on record. Hotels were full, coastal construction was advancing, and the beach access debate was accelerating. Then, in March, the pandemic changed everything. This quarterly report covers Q1 2020 — the last season Jamaica’s coast operated as usual.

The final quarter of 2019 brought Jamaica’s best-ever tourism numbers, the commercial enclosure of Little Dunn’s River, and a coastal access movement that was moving from protest to litigation. Q4 2019 was the season the beach rights argument became impossible for policymakers to ignore.

Negril’s Seven Mile Beach has been losing close to two metres of shoreline every year for decades. With the resort’s property market and tourism economy built entirely on that natural asset, beach erosion is not an environmental footnote. It is the most direct risk in the investment case.

In the spring of 2019, the conflict over the beach near Bob Marley’s birthplace in Nine Mile, St Ann, moved from local controversy to national cause célèbre. Combined with early coral bleaching surveys and a development boom on the north coast, Q2 2019 was a pivotal quarter in Jamaica’s coastal history.

The first quarter of 2019 brought record investment announcements in Jamaica’s coastal hotel sector and a parallel surge in environmental submissions warning that the pace of development was outstripping the regulatory capacity to manage it. The two stories — boom and alarm — ran simultaneously, as they had for years.