coastal resilience

As 2015 closed with Jamaica approaching 2 million annual stopover arrivals for the first time, coastal scientists were publishing survey data that measured a different kind of record: the continued narrowing of key beaches, the retreat of the shoreline at Negril, and the cumulative physical cost of a tourism model that had never accounted for the asset it was consuming.

The sargassum crisis that had devastated Jamaica’s beaches in 2014 returned in 2015, establishing beyond doubt that the brown tide was a structural feature of Caribbean waters rather than a one-off event. Alongside it, Jamaica’s tourism investment continued, and the first formal studies of sargassum’s long-term economic impact on Caribbean tourism were published.

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 summer of 2014 was the quarter Jamaica first experienced the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt at full force. Within weeks of the seaweed arriving, beaches that had been pristine were buried, guests were complaining, and the tourism industry was confronting a challenge it had no plan for, no budget for, and no experience of managing.

The final quarter of 2013 brought a sobering set of measurements from Negril. Survey data confirmed what residents and resort operators had been observing for years: Seven Mile Beach was shrinking. The cumulative sand loss was now large enough to be visible in comparisons with photographs taken a decade earlier, and the question of whether anything could reverse the trend was one the government could no longer avoid.

The summer of 2013 brought a comprehensive survey of Jamaica’s coral reef systems whose findings were both more nuanced and more troubling than either the reef’s advocates or its critics had anticipated. Recovery was occurring on some reefs. But the conditions required for that recovery to be durable were not present everywhere, and the threats that had driven decades of decline had not been removed.

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.

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.

Tropical Storm Lee’s passage through the Caribbean in September 2011, though not a direct strike on Jamaica, produced rainfall and storm surge conditions that caused significant coastal damage at multiple sites. The pattern of damage was, once again, instructive about the relationship between coastal development decisions and storm vulnerability.

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 summer of 2010 produced sea surface temperatures around Jamaica that exceeded the thermal tolerance of the island’s coral reefs for an extended period, triggering a bleaching event that was, at the time, the most severe recorded for Jamaican reefs in over a decade. The event was a preview of the conditions that climate scientists had been projecting would become more frequent as ocean temperatures rose.

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 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 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.