As 2024 drew to a close, a cluster of beach access cases was working through the Jamaican court system, testing the limits of a colonial-era law that most advocates say is no longer fit for purpose. The results will shape the island’s coastline for a generation.

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 summer of 2005 saw Jamaica’s north coast resort development boom at a critical inflection. Application volumes were high, construction was active on multiple fronts, and the regulatory system was under pressure to approve quickly and ask questions later. The pattern of approvals being granted with conditions that were never enforced was already well established, and the scale of the boom was making it worse.

The summer of 2004 produced what was arguably the first systematic public survey of beach access corridor compliance across Jamaica’s north coast resort belt. The results were not surprising to those who had been watching the issue, but they were documented in a form that was new — specific, comparative, and impossible to dismiss as anecdote.

The first quarter of 2001 saw legal advocates begin exploring whether Jamaica’s Prescription Act could be used to establish legal rights of coastal access based on long-term customary use. The question had significant implications for communities whose traditional beach access had been blocked by resort development.

Negril’s Seven Mile Beach drew hippies before hotels ever arrived. Cliff-top West End land sold for near-nothing in the late 1960s. The…

The second quarter of 1996 saw legal questions about the ownership and management of Jamaica’s foreshore — the area between the high and low water marks — come to prominence in the context of several resort development disputes.