Each September, thousands of Jamaicans wade into the sea to remove what the rest of the year puts there. The numbers have never been better. The underlying problem has never been larger.

Jamaica’s National Environment and Planning Agency is the gatekeeper for major coastal development approvals. But environmental advocates, researchers, and affected communities have raised persistent questions about whether its EIA process is sufficiently robust to protect the island’s coast from the cumulative impacts of the current development boom.

Planning and development are essential components of land use management and urban growth, particularly in Jamaica. This guide will delve into the…

Negril’s Great Morass has been drying since the 1950s, fuelling recurring fires and degrading the reef and beach that the resort depends on. A US$13-million international restoration project launched in 2021 offers the most serious attempt yet to reverse decades of ecological damage.

Q4 2018 closed Jamaica’s strongest tourism year to date with record arrivals, full hotels, and a pipeline of new resort approvals. It also delivered a new scientific survey of Negril’s eroding shoreline and renewed questions about whether the planning system was keeping pace with the pressures it was supposed to manage.

The summer of 2018 was Jamaica’s busiest tourism peak in years — and one of its most contested in terms of public beach access. Reports of fences erected overnight, access routes blocked by resort construction, and community beaches under commercial pressure shaped a quarter that saw the beach access argument shift from peripheral to mainstream.

The first quarter of 2018 arrived with Jamaica’s hotel investment pipeline at its fullest since before the 2008 financial crisis. International brands were making firm commitments to new Jamaica properties, coastal land values were rising, and environmental advocates were watching development approvals accelerate through a system that had not been reformed to manage the volume.

The devastating hurricane season of 2017 left Jamaica largely unscathed but its Caribbean neighbours in ruins, and the final quarter of the year was dominated by a regional reckoning with coastal resilience. In Jamaica, the questions Irma and Maria raised were not matched by any immediate changes to the development framework they exposed as inadequate.

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 first quarter of 2017 marked the JLP government’s first full year managing Jamaica’s coastal development agenda. Tourism investment was the dominant priority. Beach access reform, mangrove protection, and the accumulated backlog of environmental enforcement issues were moving more slowly. The pattern of the coming years was already visible.