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.

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.