Jamaica beaches

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 second quarter of 2012 saw sustained legal and advocacy pressure on the question of whether Jamaica’s Beach Control Act was being enforced. The Act, passed in 1956 and amended several times since, remained the primary legislative instrument for regulating beach access in Jamaica. Sixty years after its passage, advocates were asking why its public access provisions remained so widely disregarded.

The final quarter of 2011 saw Jamaica deepen its engagement with the International Monetary Fund under a fiscal consolidation programme that was squeezing public expenditure across all sectors, including the coastal and environmental management agencies whose underfunding had long been identified as a root cause of Jamaica’s coastal governance failures.

Tropical Storm Lee’s passage through the Caribbean in September 2011, though not a direct strike on Jamaica, produced rainfall and storm surge conditions that caused significant coastal damage at multiple sites. The pattern of damage was, once again, instructive about the relationship between coastal development decisions and storm vulnerability.

The second quarter of 2011 brought renewed scrutiny to the impact of coastal resort development on the communities living nearest to it. The displacement that accompanied hotel construction was rarely as visible as the hotels themselves — it happened incrementally, through rising land values, through informal pressure, through the loss of access to fishing grounds and traditional beach sites — but its cumulative effect on coastal communities was substantial.

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.

Two years after the financial crisis had frozen Jamaica’s coastal development boom, the final quarter of 2010 offered a moment to take stock of what the boom had left behind. The resorts were built, the beaches had been narrowed, the access corridors were uncut, and the environmental conditions that had been baseline when the boom began were now significantly altered. What would recovery mean, and who would pay for it?

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 second quarter of 2010 saw renewed legal argument about whether the Prescription Act’s provisions for acquisition of rights through long use could establish public access rights to beaches that had been privately controlled for extended periods. The debate drew in the Beach Control Act’s provisions and raised fundamental questions about how Jamaica’s contradictory legal framework for beach access could be resolved.

The first quarter of 2010 marked the low point of post-crash development activity on Jamaica’s coast. Hotel project announcements had fallen silent, construction cranes on resort developments were stationary, and the regulatory agencies that had been overwhelmed by the boom were processing a much lighter workload. The question was what to do with the quiet.

A year after the global financial crisis had effectively halted new coastal resort investment in Jamaica, the final quarter of 2009 offered a clearer picture of what the crash had interrupted and what it had left behind. The developments that had been built were built; the environmental and access impacts had occurred; and now the question was what the coast would look like through the austerity years that followed.

The 2009 hurricane season arrived on a Jamaica coast that had been significantly altered by half a decade of intensive resort development. The beaches were narrower. The natural buffers had been reduced. And the communities that had lived on the coast for generations were doing so with less of the natural protection that had historically moderated storm impacts.

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.

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 final quarter of 2008 was the quarter in which Jamaica’s coastal resort development boom ended. The financial crisis that had been building through the summer crystallised in September and October into a global credit freeze that cut off the financing Jamaica’s resort development projects depended on. The cranes stopped. The construction fences went up. The coast that the boom had been in the process of making was now the coast that Jamaica was left with.