Diana McCaulay | Protecting the Palisadoes

Thanks to The Sunday Gleaner (May 22, 2021) for the story re the sea defence works on the Palisadoes tombolo, pointing out the all-too-common situation that the mitigation measures identified as necessary to avoid environmental damage have not been done 10 years later.

Some background: Palisadoes is a geological feature, estimated by the University of the West Indies (UWI) to be about 4,000 years old, once a series of small islands or cays, nourished by sand from the Hope and Cane rivers farther up the coast.

It’s worth pointing out that sand mining in those rivers has reduced the sediment that built and maintains the tombolo, which, in turn, created Kingston Harbour. Groynes constructed in the 1950s after Hurricane Charlie protected the Palisadoes but were not maintained.

The Palisadoes/Port Royal Protected Area was declared in 1998, and this was followed by its declaration as a Ramsar site (a wetland of international importance) in 2005. An early management plan was done with grant funding but never implemented.

Hurricane Ivan damaged the tombolo in 2004 and the threat of a breach became obvious – but confined to a small area of the strip. A Cuban design for a stone revetment was done with mitigation measures of dredging of sand from a nearby bank in the sea to recreate sand dunes, the replanting of beach vegetation, a boardwalk on top of the stones and replanting of mangroves on the harbour side. The Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was done by CL Environmental and CEAC Solutions.

The stones were put in place and mangroves were replanted on the harbour side. Hurricane Dean in 2007 covered the Palisadoes road with sand. It was quickly cleared.

Then in roughly 2010, a much expanded project was announced by the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) administration – a four-km-long four-lane raised highway with sea defence works on the sea side and a sea wall on the harbour side. A new EIA was not required by the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) for this vastly different scope of work.

The Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) filed a judicial review case on two main issues: questioning whether the correct permits and licences had been issued and whether the public consultation process met the legal standard. The court ruled that once the road was not a four-lane highway and the dune restoration plan was done, the correct permits/licences had been issued, but that the public process did not meet the legal standard. A farce of a public meeting was held when much of the bulldozing had already occurred.

The contractors were supposed to restore the project administration site, replant mangroves on the harbour side and implement the sand dune restoration plan. Only limited mangrove planting was carried out years later by UWI at taxpayers’ expense.

As the Gleaner story described, the mangroves are affected by garbage (although most of it is coming from the gullies, not from joggers), and the restoration of the sand dunes has never been done.

JET has also been represented on a NEPA-led committee for the management of the protected area, which has met infrequently. Still, 23 years after the protected area was declared, there are no regulations or a finalised management plan, which was last week sent to JET again for input, although its term ends in six months.

THE LESSONS

The lessons of the sea defence works in the Palisadoes/Port Royal Protected Area apply to many other projects.

Here they are:

1. Promises of mitigation measures are unlikely to be met, especially not for government-led projects. The measures may be done poorly, late, or not at all, and taxpayers may well be left with the bill.

2. Monitoring and enforcement will be weak. Declaring an area protected often means little – any project can be done in a protected area, once it has the required permit or licence.

3. Despite the rhetoric of understanding the importance of natural features in building or restoring resilience in the face of the climate crisis, which is already upon us, the Jamaican State sees hard structures as the appropriate response and can always find funding for revetments, seawalls and groynes while none can be found for the protection of mangroves, seagrasses or coral reefs.

Diana McCaulay is the founder of the Jamaica Environment Trust. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com