A government proposal to encourage hotels to charge Jamaicans a fee to access hotel-controlled beaches has drawn fierce opposition from campaigners, who argue it would formalise the privatisation of the country’s foreshore and turn a legal right into a commercial transaction.

Kingston, Jamaica — 15 March 2026 A new wave of coastal real estate development centred around marina living and bayfront tourism is…

The Airports Authority of Jamaica’s $9.5 billion post-Melissa infrastructure programme includes works at Norman Manley International Airport on the Palisadoes tombolo — an internationally protected coastal spit where development decisions carry outsized environmental risk.

A dormant beachfront site on Negril’s Seven Mile Beach is being converted into 22 boutique condo-hotel units by a Canadian investment group, continuing a pattern of diaspora and foreign capital acquiring and transforming underperforming hotel assets in the resort.

Kingston, Jamaica — 2 January 2026 Financial services group Proven Group Limited has signalled a significant near-term boost to its earnings from…

In October 2025, residents of Flanker and surrounding communities filed legal action in the St James Parish Court to protect their right of access to Providence Beach, as Sandals Montego Bay prepared to build overwater bungalows and wetland modifications that campaigners say will permanently alter the coastline.

Jamaica is in the middle of its largest hotel investment cycle in a generation, with several billion dollars of new resort and residential development at various stages of planning and construction. A look at the pipeline, the projects, the players, and the environmental and access questions they raise.

Jamaica’s National Environment and Planning Agency is the gatekeeper for major coastal development approvals. But environmental advocates, researchers, and affected communities have raised persistent questions about whether its EIA process is sufficiently robust to protect the island’s coast from the cumulative impacts of the current development boom.

A new condition attached to major resort approvals in Trelawny and St Ann requires developers to provide physical public access corridors to the beach. It may be the most significant practical change in how Jamaica manages its coastline in a generation.

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.