JSE 7th Regional Conference Ended on Thursday January 26, 2012

Opening remarks, very privileged to be here, thank the organizers for invitation…

 

 

Glad the question is posed in this way, because this is how it is often framed in the media – we must make a choice between a vibrant tourist industry OR a healthy natural environment. But we must remember that a tourist industry develops where there is a healthy natural environment and if this disappears, so eventually will the tourists… I only have ten minutes so I won’t have time to talk about why clean air and water, proper sanitation, forests for oxygen and control of soil erosion, healthy coral reefs – which give us healthy fisheries are all important to us, the people who call Jamaica home, but please take that as a given. This is not solely or even mainly about our visitors. I also don’t have time to talk about the economics, what the approach we have used has cost us. I’m going to illustrate this issue by using Negril as a case study.

This is what Negril used to look like in the 1950s. Look at the beach – wide, fringed with thick vegetation, coconut trees mostly, and the Negril Morass behind. Look at the water quality of one of the rivers – that became the South Negril River – look how clear it is, two people standing right where the river meets the sea.

Typical of many coastal ecosystems – a large wetland (read mosquitoes, crocodiles, often not so compatible with tourists), coastal mangroves, seagrass beds – what we call seaweed – a wide, stable beach, and the coral reefs offshore. These things were beautiful, but they also gave us important services, services we did not have to pay for.

The morass – flood control, habitat for wildlife

Coastal mangroves – protection from storms, extend land outwards, filter run off from land, habitat for birds, many types of marine organism

Seagrass beds – stablilization of beach sand, production of sand (some species), habitat

Coral reefs – first line of defence from storms, habitat for great many food fish, including those that produce sand 

The first thing we did was – drain the morass. This was done in the 1950s – using explosives, channels were dug and the north and south Negril rivers were joined. We interviewed an old timer, Cyril Connelly a 90-odd year old fisher who worked on the drainage project and he explained how before the morass was drained, there were many small rivers and streams that trickled from the morass into the sea, the water crystal clear. After, there were two major rivers and the Negril morass started to dry out.   

So we drained the morass, we put in a road. Have a look at the water quality at the South Negril river mouth – not looking so good now – even before there were many hotels.    

We started and continued development in Negril without adequate attention paid to sewage. We didn’t understand at that time that partially treated sewage discharged into the sea causes algae to grow all over the coral reef and kills it. Right through the 70s and 80s we continued building in Negril with a sewage treatment plant that was badly undersized and many homes and properties were not connected to it at all.

 

To this day, we still do this. We think of mangroves as places to breed mosquitoes and possibly crocodiles, so we rip them out. We don’t like to go into the sea and feel the seaweed on our feet – we want plain sand – so we took those out too. We still take out all the beach vegetation, which holds the beach sand and provides habitat for nesting turtles.

And then the beach started to erode. Beaches always move around – in fact, one definition of a beach is ‘sand in motion’ – some parts of a beach build up and other parts drift away in different seasons. As soon as we started to see parts of the beach erode in Negril, we reacted by putting in sea defence works like groynes. A groyne is a kind of pier that is built out into the sea that does trap sand on one side of it. But it depletes sand on the other side..so then there started to be arguments among the hoteliers in Negril and the response was – more and more groynes. 

Farmers lit fires in the morass to clear land and plant crops. Agricultural run off polluted the North and South Rivers and the sea… the coral reefs started to die.

 

Please don’t think that Negril WANTED high density development. In fact, Negril had seen the results in Ocho Rios and Montego Bay and they WANTED low density development, at least so they said. They WANTED nothing taller than the tallest coconut tree, they wanted to keep Negril’s character. But they did not succeed, because each time a new development went in, the rules were bent a little more – and of course there was no force of law behind the wish to have hotels lower than the tallest coconut tree. 

 

 

One by one, we started to put in hotels. We didn’t plan for housing, transportation, schools, sewage, solid waste or cumulative impacts. We built hotels too close to the sea. We did declare an environmental protected area, but still, we went ahead, hotel after hotel, domino after domino, and now the dominoes stand very close to one another, very unstable. 

 

Until this is what Negril looked like – you can still just see the roundabout. And remember all of this happened without due attention paid to sewage. In the mid 1990s, the European Union lent Jamaica money to build a proper sewage treatment plant in Negril. This caused incredible disruption – it is very difficult to put in sewer systems after the fact. And even when it was finished – the big hotels connected to it, but not all the small ones and very few of the individual houses. 

 

This is an aerial shot of the loss of beach over decades. 

Negril’s coral reefs have gone from roughly 65% live coral cover to less than 3% coral cover in places in less than 30 years – some of this due to storms, over fishing, sea urchin viruses and sea temperature rise. But some due to the poor environmental management already described. My opinion now, Negril is crowded, it is dirty, it is ugly, the beach is disappearing in parts, there are fires in the morass affecting air quality and human health and the fishing is now poor – as it is all along Jamaica’s north coast.   And did Jamaicans get jobs? They did, it is true. Could we have created jobs without destroying Negril’s natural resources? I believe we could.  

 

Tourism is certainly an enemy of the environment if we proceed in this way. But we don’t have to. Negril presents abundant lessons of the wrong way to do things. It’s time we started to do tourism development the right way – and that is ensure we do not damage the integrity of the natural resources that we depend on and that bring people to our shores in the first place.     

 

 

Thank you.