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.

By the second quarter of 2013, Winnifred Beach in Portland had been the subject of a decade-long public access dispute that had become something of a cause célèbre for advocates of Jamaica’s Beach Control Act. The quarter saw the dispute reach a new stage, as attempts to enforce the conversion of the beach to a fee-charging facility faced sustained public resistance.

Superstorm Sandy’s October 2012 track took it north of Jamaica, but the storm surge and wave impacts that reached Jamaica’s north coast provided a vivid demonstration of the island’s coastal exposure. The final quarter of 2012 was a period of assessment — not just of the physical damage, but of the infrastructure and governance choices that had made Jamaica’s coast more vulnerable than it needed to be.

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?