Jamaica’s beachfront real estate market continues to attract premium prices even as the scientific case for its long-term vulnerability strengthens. How investors, buyers, and banks are — or are not — pricing climate risk into the island’s most coveted coastal properties.

The first quarter of 2018 arrived with Jamaica’s hotel investment pipeline at its fullest since before the 2008 financial crisis. International brands were making firm commitments to new Jamaica properties, coastal land values were rising, and environmental advocates were watching development approvals accelerate through a system that had not been reformed to manage the volume.

The first quarter of 2017 marked the JLP government’s first full year managing Jamaica’s coastal development agenda. Tourism investment was the dominant priority. Beach access reform, mangrove protection, and the accumulated backlog of environmental enforcement issues were moving more slowly. The pattern of the coming years was already visible.

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 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.