Jamaica beaches

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.

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.

Hurricane Dean made landfall on Jamaica’s south coast on August 19, 2007, as a Category 4 storm — the first major hurricane to make direct landfall in Jamaica since Gilbert in 1988. The storm’s path and its aftermath offered a searing test of what two decades of coastal development had done to Jamaica’s vulnerability, and the results were instructive in ways the boom’s promoters had not anticipated.

By the second quarter of 2007, the north coast resort development boom had consumed most of the obvious coastal sites between Montego Bay and Ocho Rios. Developers were looking further east toward Portland and further west toward Hanover and Westmoreland, and the Environmental Impact Assessment pipeline was filling with applications for areas that had previously been considered too remote or too ecologically sensitive to attract serious investment interest.

The first quarter of 2007 brought heightened attention to what access advocates had been documenting for years: the systematic exclusion of the Jamaican public from the beaches fronting the island’s major all-inclusive resorts. The access corridor requirement that was supposed to guarantee a public right of way had become, in practice, an administrative fiction at most properties along the resort belt.

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 2006 Atlantic hurricane season was active, but Jamaica avoided direct landfall from any major system. For the north coast resort development boom, the season passed essentially without incident. For the coastal scientists tracking what the boom was doing to Jamaica’s storm resilience, the quiet season was not reassuring — it was a deferral of an accounting that would eventually arrive.

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.

The first quarter of 2006 found Jamaica’s National Environment and Planning Agency at a critical juncture. Established in 2000 as an institutional framework for integrated environmental management, NEPA was, in its sixth year, facing a development boom that exceeded the scale it had been designed to manage, with a capacity that had not grown proportionally and political pressures that consistently favoured investment approval over environmental caution.

The final quarter of 2005 found Jamaica’s reef systems absorbing the combined effects of the most active hurricane season on record and the most severe Caribbean bleaching event ever documented. The two events had interacted in ways that made the total ecological cost greater than the sum of the individual impacts, and the recovery challenge Jamaica faced was correspondingly more difficult.

The summer of 2005 saw Jamaica’s north coast resort development boom at a critical inflection. Application volumes were high, construction was active on multiple fronts, and the regulatory system was under pressure to approve quickly and ask questions later. The pattern of approvals being granted with conditions that were never enforced was already well established, and the scale of the boom was making it worse.

Fifty years after its passage, the Beach Control Act of 1956 remained Jamaica’s primary legislative instrument for beach governance. In the second quarter of 2005, a renewed advocacy push focused attention on what fifty years of the Act had actually produced: a legal framework that affirmed public beach access in principle while consistently failing to secure it in practice.

As the north coast resort boom accelerated in early 2005, the Portland Bight Protected Area on Jamaica’s south-central coast offered a striking counterpoint: a large coastal and marine protected area where the governance frameworks that were failing spectacularly on the north coast had, imperfectly but meaningfully, produced a different outcome.

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.