coastal resilience

Hurricane Dean made landfall on Jamaica’s south coast on August 19, 2007, as a Category 4 storm — the first major hurricane to make direct landfall in Jamaica since Gilbert in 1988. The storm’s path and its aftermath offered a searing test of what two decades of coastal development had done to Jamaica’s vulnerability, and the results were instructive in ways the boom’s promoters had not anticipated.

The 2006 Atlantic hurricane season was active, but Jamaica avoided direct landfall from any major system. For the north coast resort development boom, the season passed essentially without incident. For the coastal scientists tracking what the boom was doing to Jamaica’s storm resilience, the quiet season was not reassuring — it was a deferral of an accounting that would eventually arrive.

The final quarter of 2005 found Jamaica’s reef systems absorbing the combined effects of the most active hurricane season on record and the most severe Caribbean bleaching event ever documented. The two events had interacted in ways that made the total ecological cost greater than the sum of the individual impacts, and the recovery challenge Jamaica faced was correspondingly more difficult.

The first quarter of 2004 saw the unmistakable beginning of a new wave of coastal resort investment in Jamaica. The applications that had been filed and approved in 2001–2003 were moving into financing and construction planning stages, and the investment community was signalling confidence in Jamaica as a destination that could absorb significant new resort capacity.

The third quarter of 2003 was a period of visible coastal development activity on Jamaica’s north shore, even as forecasters tracked an active Atlantic hurricane season. The apparent contradiction between the pace of resort construction and the hazard environment in which it was occurring was noted by coastal scientists.

The first quarter of 2003 brought renewed focus on the role of mangrove forests in coastal protection, as several resort development applications in the pre-approval phase proposed construction on or adjacent to mangrove systems.

The third quarter of 2002 produced a body of scientific reporting on Jamaica’s reef systems that presented a sobering picture of long-term decline. The combination of development pressure, overfishing, and residual bleaching impact was creating conditions of accelerating reef deterioration.

The first quarter of 2002 saw the Portland Bight Protected Area, designated in 1999, confronting the fundamental challenge facing Jamaica’s marine protected areas: designation on paper had not been matched by management capacity on the water.

Hurricane Michelle’s passage through the Caribbean in November 2001, while sparing Jamaica a direct hit, deposited significant rainfall on the island and generated coastal surge that caused damage along low-lying shore sections. The event focused attention on the vulnerability of recent coastal development.

The third quarter of 2000 saw the formal establishment of the National Environment and Planning Agency, the institutional merger that brought together Jamaica’s environmental assessment and land use planning functions. For coastal advocates, the new agency represented both an opportunity and an uncertainty.

The opening quarter of 2000 offered a moment for stock-taking on Jamaica’s coastal development trajectory. The decade of the 1990s had transformed the north coast’s resort landscape; the institutional framework that would manage the next decade was still taking shape.

The final quarter of 1999 saw the gazettal of the Portland Bight Protected Area, a designation that represented Jamaica’s most significant coastal conservation commitment of the decade. The 187,000-acre protected area encompassed the island’s largest mangrove system and extensive coastal wetlands.

The first quarter of 1999 opened in the shadow of the catastrophic 1998 coral bleaching event. The full extent of coral mortality along Jamaica’s reef systems was being assessed, and the picture emerging from survey work was deeply concerning.

The fourth quarter of 1998 closed a year that would become a watershed in Jamaica’s reef history: the mass coral bleaching event driven by elevated sea surface temperatures had left large swathes of the island’s reef system bleached or dying, and the full extent of damage was still being assessed.

Seven years after the Natural Resources Conservation Authority established Jamaica’s environmental impact assessment process in 1991, the second quarter of 1998 offered a moment to assess how the EIA system was performing in its most demanding application: coastal resort development.