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.

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.

In the spring and early summer of 2008, as Jamaica’s north coast resort boom continued at full pace, the advocates who had been pressing for enforcement of public beach access rights were working against a current of institutional indifference and political resistance. The boom was producing exactly the conditions they had been warning about, and the warnings were producing exactly the impact they feared: very little.