The global mass coral bleaching event of 2016 was the most extensive in recorded history, and Jamaica’s reefs were among its victims. By the end of Q3 2016, large sections of the island’s monitored reef sites had experienced significant bleaching mortality, on top of decades of prior decline. The summer of 2016 represented a step-change in the trajectory of Jamaica’s coastal ecology.

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.