coastal development

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.

The first quarter of 2015 arrived with Jamaica’s tourism sector in the best shape it had been since before the 2008 financial crisis. Hotel room rates were up, occupancies were strong, and investors were queuing to access a piece of Jamaica’s north coast. The governance of that coast was not keeping pace.

The fourth quarter of 2014 brought Jamaica’s tourism season back after the summer’s sargassum devastation, but the reckoning continued. Operators tallied their losses, scientists published their analysis of what had happened, and the industry began the long process of adapting to a Caribbean ocean that was permanently different from the one it had built its business on.

The first quarter of 2014 saw formal announcements of hotel investment that, while years in the pipeline, represented a genuine shift in the pattern of post-2008 caution. Developers were moving again on north coast projects, and the planning system was being asked to process applications it had not seen the like of since before the financial crisis.

The first quarter of 2013 saw the publication of a national mangrove assessment that documented losses totalling hundreds of hectares over the preceding two decades. The report gave formal expression to what coastal communities had been observing informally: the mangrove forests that had once fringed much of Jamaica’s coastline were disappearing, and with them the storm protection, fisheries nursery habitat, and shoreline stability they had provided.

Superstorm Sandy’s October 2012 track took it north of Jamaica, but the storm surge and wave impacts that reached Jamaica’s north coast provided a vivid demonstration of the island’s coastal exposure. The final quarter of 2012 was a period of assessment — not just of the physical damage, but of the infrastructure and governance choices that had made Jamaica’s coast more vulnerable than it needed to be.

By the first quarter of 2012, the immediate post-financial crisis trough in Jamaica’s tourism sector was clearly behind it. Stopover arrivals were recovering, hotel occupancy was improving, and the investor caution that had frozen coastal development applications from 2009 to 2011 was beginning to ease. The challenge was to manage the returning investment in ways that did not repeat the coastal governance failures of the boom years.

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 first quarter of 2011 found Jamaica’s coastal development sector in a state of suspended animation. The financial crisis had frozen the development pipeline in 2008 and 2009. Two years later, the applications that had been filed before the freeze were still working their way through approvals processes, and new applications were being filed cautiously, in anticipation of an investment recovery that had not yet arrived in force.

Two years after the financial crisis had frozen Jamaica’s coastal development boom, the final quarter of 2010 offered a moment to take stock of what the boom had left behind. The resorts were built, the beaches had been narrowed, the access corridors were uncut, and the environmental conditions that had been baseline when the boom began were now significantly altered. What would recovery mean, and who would pay for it?

The first quarter of 2010 marked the low point of post-crash development activity on Jamaica’s coast. Hotel project announcements had fallen silent, construction cranes on resort developments were stationary, and the regulatory agencies that had been overwhelmed by the boom were processing a much lighter workload. The question was what to do with the quiet.

A year after the global financial crisis had effectively halted new coastal resort investment in Jamaica, the final quarter of 2009 offered a clearer picture of what the crash had interrupted and what it had left behind. The developments that had been built were built; the environmental and access impacts had occurred; and now the question was what the coast would look like through the austerity years that followed.

The spring of 2009 found the last of the major north coast resort developments that had been approved and financed before the financial crisis opening or nearing completion. With the boom’s physical construction phase effectively over, environmental scientists and regulators were beginning to assess what it had left behind. The findings were not encouraging.

The first quarter of 2009 marked the effective end of Jamaica’s north coast resort development boom. The financial crisis that had begun in the autumn of 2008 had dried up the international financing that had funded the boom’s later stages, and the development applications that continued to be filed were being processed in an environment where the prospect of construction finance had become remote. The boom, as a period of actual construction activity, was over.

The final quarter of 2008 was the quarter in which Jamaica’s coastal resort development boom ended. The financial crisis that had been building through the summer crystallised in September and October into a global credit freeze that cut off the financing Jamaica’s resort development projects depended on. The cranes stopped. The construction fences went up. The coast that the boom had been in the process of making was now the coast that Jamaica was left with.