Heavy equipment has moved into the Mammee Bay watershed in St Ann, beginning preparatory earthworks for the China Harbour Engineering Company’s controversial mixed-use coastal development. Environmental groups say the process has bypassed meaningful community consultation.

This story weaves in the practical application of various laws, concepts, and strategies to help contextualize each element in the journey of…

The first quarter of 2019 brought record investment announcements in Jamaica’s coastal hotel sector and a parallel surge in environmental submissions warning that the pace of development was outstripping the regulatory capacity to manage it. The two stories — boom and alarm — ran simultaneously, as they had for years.

By the first quarter of 2012, the immediate post-financial crisis trough in Jamaica’s tourism sector was clearly behind it. Stopover arrivals were recovering, hotel occupancy was improving, and the investor caution that had frozen coastal development applications from 2009 to 2011 was beginning to ease. The challenge was to manage the returning investment in ways that did not repeat the coastal governance failures of the boom years.

The spring of 2009 found the last of the major north coast resort developments that had been approved and financed before the financial crisis opening or nearing completion. With the boom’s physical construction phase effectively over, environmental scientists and regulators were beginning to assess what it had left behind. The findings were not encouraging.

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.

As 2003 closed, Jamaica’s coastal development planning system was visibly straining under the pressure of an expanded application load. The backlog of pending environmental impact assessments had grown substantially during the year.

By mid-2001, the National Environment and Planning Agency had been in full operation for over a year, and the first patterns of its approvals practice were becoming discernible. The agency was processing a substantially larger volume of coastal development applications than its predecessor bodies had handled.

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.

As Jamaica’s mid-1990s resort construction boom gathered pace, the Natural Resources Conservation Authority was processing an expanding pipeline of environmental impact assessments for coastal developments. The first quarter of 1996 found the authority’s capacity under visible strain.