Coastal communities

The first quarter of 2016 was the final full quarter of the PNP government’s administration of Jamaica’s coast. Amid strong tourism numbers, active development approvals, and another organised defence of Winnifred Beach, the country was heading to the polls in February. The election result — a one-seat JLP majority — would shift the coastal development conversation significantly.

Spring 2015 brought another round of resort development activity along Jamaica’s north coast, but the most significant story of the quarter was not the new construction — it was the quieter, incremental process by which existing coastal access was being eroded through the accumulation of small decisions, fences, and physical changes that no single planning authority was tracking as a whole.

By the second quarter of 2014, Jamaica’s beach access corridor regime had been nominally in place for several years — yet systematic non-compliance remained the rule rather than the exception. The gap between policy on paper and reality on the ground had become a defining feature of Jamaica’s coastal governance landscape.

By the second quarter of 2013, Winnifred Beach in Portland had been the subject of a decade-long public access dispute that had become something of a cause célèbre for advocates of Jamaica’s Beach Control Act. The quarter saw the dispute reach a new stage, as attempts to enforce the conversion of the beach to a fee-charging facility faced sustained public resistance.

The summer of 2012 brought renewed attention to a practice that had been degrading Jamaica’s beaches for decades: illegal and poorly regulated sand mining. A series of media investigations and community complaints focused on specific sites where sand was being extracted from beaches and riverbeds at rates that were visibly altering the coastline, and where the regulatory response had been inadequate to match the scale of the activity.

The final quarter of 2011 saw Jamaica deepen its engagement with the International Monetary Fund under a fiscal consolidation programme that was squeezing public expenditure across all sectors, including the coastal and environmental management agencies whose underfunding had long been identified as a root cause of Jamaica’s coastal governance failures.

The second quarter of 2011 brought renewed scrutiny to the impact of coastal resort development on the communities living nearest to it. The displacement that accompanied hotel construction was rarely as visible as the hotels themselves — it happened incrementally, through rising land values, through informal pressure, through the loss of access to fishing grounds and traditional beach sites — but its cumulative effect on coastal communities was substantial.

The second quarter of 2010 saw renewed legal argument about whether the Prescription Act’s provisions for acquisition of rights through long use could establish public access rights to beaches that had been privately controlled for extended periods. The debate drew in the Beach Control Act’s provisions and raised fundamental questions about how Jamaica’s contradictory legal framework for beach access could be resolved.

The 2009 hurricane season arrived on a Jamaica coast that had been significantly altered by half a decade of intensive resort development. The beaches were narrower. The natural buffers had been reduced. And the communities that had lived on the coast for generations were doing so with less of the natural protection that had historically moderated storm impacts.

The spring of 2006 brought a focused debate about the relationship between Jamaica’s coastal wetland systems — mangroves, seagrass beds, and freshwater-saline transition zones — and the resort developments that were being approved along the north coast. The debate had scientific, legal, and moral dimensions, and none of them was being adequately addressed in the approvals process.

Fifty years after its passage, the Beach Control Act of 1956 remained Jamaica’s primary legislative instrument for beach governance. In the second quarter of 2005, a renewed advocacy push focused attention on what fifty years of the Act had actually produced: a legal framework that affirmed public beach access in principle while consistently failing to secure it in practice.

The second quarter of 2003 saw environmental and community advocates pushing for a systematic audit of beach access compliance across Jamaica’s north coast. The push produced debates about who had authority to conduct such an audit and what its findings would obligate the government to do.

The closing months of 2002 brought the long-running problem of illegal sand mining to particular prominence. Reports from multiple parishes described continued extraction of beach sand for construction, with enforcement proving unable to keep pace with the economic incentive driving the activity.

The third quarter of 2002 produced a body of scientific reporting on Jamaica’s reef systems that presented a sobering picture of long-term decline. The combination of development pressure, overfishing, and residual bleaching impact was creating conditions of accelerating reef deterioration.

Hurricane Michelle’s passage through the Caribbean in November 2001, while sparing Jamaica a direct hit, deposited significant rainfall on the island and generated coastal surge that caused damage along low-lying shore sections. The event focused attention on the vulnerability of recent coastal development.