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.

Spring 2015 brought another round of resort development activity along Jamaica’s north coast, but the most significant story of the quarter was not the new construction — it was the quieter, incremental process by which existing coastal access was being eroded through the accumulation of small decisions, fences, and physical changes that no single planning authority was tracking as a whole.

The first quarter of 2015 arrived with Jamaica’s tourism sector in the best shape it had been since before the 2008 financial crisis. Hotel room rates were up, occupancies were strong, and investors were queuing to access a piece of Jamaica’s north coast. The governance of that coast was not keeping pace.

The first quarter of 2014 saw formal announcements of hotel investment that, while years in the pipeline, represented a genuine shift in the pattern of post-2008 caution. Developers were moving again on north coast projects, and the planning system was being asked to process applications it had not seen the like of since before the financial crisis.

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