coral reef Jamaica

The completion of Jamaica’s EU-funded ‘Hills to Ocean’ climate resilience project marks a turning point in how the island monitors, protects and restores its wetlands and coastal ecosystems — with lessons that extend well beyond the three watersheds it covered.

For the first time, Jamaica’s nationally determined climate contributions include specific coastal ecosystem targets for mangroves and seagrass. It is a quiet but potentially consequential shift in how the island manages its most threatened natural barriers.

As Jamaica breaks ground on the US$1 billion Harmony Cove resort in Trelawny and a new wave of north coast investment accelerates, NEPA’s first Coral Reef Awareness Month puts the ecological stakes of the island’s development boom in sharp focus.

In the spring of 2019, the conflict over the beach near Bob Marley’s birthplace in Nine Mile, St Ann, moved from local controversy to national cause célèbre. Combined with early coral bleaching surveys and a development boom on the north coast, Q2 2019 was a pivotal quarter in Jamaica’s coastal history.

The summer of 2017 delivered another mass bleaching event to Jamaica’s reefs, as sea surface temperatures across the Caribbean climbed above threshold for the second consecutive year. Combined with the ongoing sargassum season and a tourism peak that was straining the coast’s carrying capacity, Q3 2017 posed questions about the long-term sustainability of Jamaica’s reef-dependent tourism model.

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.

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 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.

The first quarter of 2008 saw Jamaica’s tourism sector operating at peak levels, with room rates and occupancy figures supporting the case for continued resort investment. At the same time, the ecological monitoring data that scientists were producing painted a picture of the environmental cost at which that tourism economy was being sustained. The quarter crystallised a tension that had been building for a decade.

By the second quarter of 2007, the north coast resort development boom had consumed most of the obvious coastal sites between Montego Bay and Ocho Rios. Developers were looking further east toward Portland and further west toward Hanover and Westmoreland, and the Environmental Impact Assessment pipeline was filling with applications for areas that had previously been considered too remote or too ecologically sensitive to attract serious investment interest.

Eighteen months after the record Caribbean-wide coral bleaching event of 2005, the quarter-four 2006 reef monitoring surveys were beginning to document the scale of what had been lost and the prospects for recovery. The findings were sobering: mortality rates at Jamaican reef sites had been among the highest in the Caribbean, and the recovery trajectory was contingent on conditions that the development boom was actively undermining.

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 spring of 2004 saw Jamaica’s scientists making the economic argument for reef conservation with a new urgency: not just that reefs were ecologically valuable, which no one disputed, but that their degradation was a direct economic cost to the tourism industry that depended on them. The argument was strategically targeted at the stakeholders whose decisions were most directly responsible for the degradation.

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 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.