As 2015 closed with Jamaica approaching 2 million annual stopover arrivals for the first time, coastal scientists were publishing survey data that measured a different kind of record: the continued narrowing of key beaches, the retreat of the shoreline at Negril, and the cumulative physical cost of a tourism model that had never accounted for the asset it was consuming.

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.