Environmental Protection

The final quarter of 2013 brought a sobering set of measurements from Negril. Survey data confirmed what residents and resort operators had been observing for years: Seven Mile Beach was shrinking. The cumulative sand loss was now large enough to be visible in comparisons with photographs taken a decade earlier, and the question of whether anything could reverse the trend was one the government could no longer avoid.

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 first quarter of 2013 saw the publication of a national mangrove assessment that documented losses totalling hundreds of hectares over the preceding two decades. The report gave formal expression to what coastal communities had been observing informally: the mangrove forests that had once fringed much of Jamaica’s coastline were disappearing, and with them the storm protection, fisheries nursery habitat, and shoreline stability they had provided.

The summer of 2012 brought renewed attention to a practice that had been degrading Jamaica’s beaches for decades: illegal and poorly regulated sand mining. A series of media investigations and community complaints focused on specific sites where sand was being extracted from beaches and riverbeds at rates that were visibly altering the coastline, and where the regulatory response had been inadequate to match the scale of the activity.

The first quarter of 2011 found Jamaica’s coastal development sector in a state of suspended animation. The financial crisis had frozen the development pipeline in 2008 and 2009. Two years later, the applications that had been filed before the freeze were still working their way through approvals processes, and new applications were being filed cautiously, in anticipation of an investment recovery that had not yet arrived in force.

A landmark performance audit of the National Environment and Planning Agency exposes a decade of regulatory failure in which billions of taxpayer dollars bankrolled an agency that left more than half of all environmental complaints unanswered. For Ja

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 2009 marked the effective end of Jamaica’s north coast resort development boom. The financial crisis that had begun in the autumn of 2008 had dried up the international financing that had funded the boom’s later stages, and the development applications that continued to be filed were being processed in an environment where the prospect of construction finance had become remote. The boom, as a period of actual construction activity, was over.

The summer of 2008 was the summit of Jamaica’s north coast resort development boom. Construction activity was at its highest. Planning applications were at record volumes. The regulatory agencies were under their maximum pressure. And the advocates who had been raising alarms about the coast’s trajectory were making their arguments to institutions that were fully occupied with managing the boom rather than questioning its direction.

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.

The final quarter of 2007 sat at the apex of Jamaica’s longest and most intensive coastal resort development boom. Tourism was thriving, construction was at its most active, and the investment that had been flowing into the north coast for four years showed no signs of slowing. Within a year, the global financial crisis would end it all. But in December 2007, the boom seemed permanent, and the coast was paying the price of that permanence.

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 spring of 2006 brought a focused debate about the relationship between Jamaica’s coastal wetland systems — mangroves, seagrass beds, and freshwater-saline transition zones — and the resort developments that were being approved along the north coast. The debate had scientific, legal, and moral dimensions, and none of them was being adequately addressed in the approvals process.

By the end of 2004, what had started as a resumption of post-millennial tourism investment had become a full-scale resort construction boom. The projects that had been in the planning stages for two to three years were now breaking ground, and the cumulative effect of multiple simultaneous construction starts on Jamaica’s north coast was beginning to register in both the environmental monitoring data and in community experience.

The summer of 2004 produced what was arguably the first systematic public survey of beach access corridor compliance across Jamaica’s north coast resort belt. The results were not surprising to those who had been watching the issue, but they were documented in a form that was new — specific, comparative, and impossible to dismiss as anecdote.