THE SUSTAINABLE DESTINATION REVIEW · VOL. TWOTHE SUSTAINABLE DESTINATION REVIEW · VOL. TWO
From Negril to Montego Bay, Rose Hall, Ocho Rios and Portland, tourism teams moved from talking about stewardship to doing it. Inside: the first Keep It Clean proof point, JAPEX's social turn, the Blue Economy plan, BIOFIN, Half Moon's solar wager, and the road to April 2027.
On September 19, tourism teams went onto beaches, roadsides and coastal stretches with bags, gloves, cameras and, crucially, a common reporting standard. Two days earlier, JAPEX had closed its commercial programme by taking delegates into a hospital, a recovery programme and a fish sanctuary. At national level, fisheries and aquaculture stakeholders validated a five-year plan meant to turn Blue Economy policy into sequenced action. And Jamaica has opened the BIOFIN process, which asks an equally practical question about biodiversity: what do we spend now, what will we need, and how do we finance the gap?
These stories are not separate. They are the connective tissue the Committee's programme exists to build: action, evidence, finance, standards and accountability, each reinforcing the next. That argument runs through every page of this edition. Volume One made the case that sustainability is tourism management. Volume Two shows what that looks like when the idea leaves the page.
A cleanup without measurement is a photograph. A strategy without implementation is a document. An ecosystem without finance is a vulnerability. A standard without governance is a logo.
JHTA sites worked to a single playbook: a named coordinator per site, common capture fields, photographs and one lesson per team. That shared standard is the foundation on which the first Keep It Clean impact statement will be built.
Negril Beach Park and the West End Cliffs, with an underwater component at the cliffs.
The corridor from Dead End Beach toward Harmony Beach, with SeaGarden as the meeting point.
The Aqueduct and Sunrise Beach at Half Moon, hosted by Half Moon Charities with the Rose Hall Great House team.
Property-led cleanups across St. Ann, St. Mary and Portland, counted into the wider story.
National figures give context. Keep It Clean has set itself a higher bar: its own story, told from its own verified site returns. Credibility begins with counting our own.
ICCD 2026 gave Keep It Clean Jamaica its first live test. The important result is not only what came off the coastline. It is whether the industry can turn dozens of local acts into one measurable destination-stewardship programme.
September 19 began with a simple proposition: one day, one coastline, one commitment to a cleaner Jamaica. The JHTA invited members, teams, families and friends to take part through their chapters, positioning the cleanup not as volunteerism alone but as a visible expression of the industry's responsibility for the natural assets on which it operates.
The mobilization reached across the resort map, and the images coming back make it tangible: shoreline work by Half Moon teams, activity at the Aqueduct, Secrets and Breathless volunteers on the pier, SeaGarden and Deja crews along the corridor. These are not stock photographs. They put recognizable tourism workers inside the story this Review exists to tell: stewardship becoming part of the work of the destination.
The JHTA activation sat inside a larger national movement of 162 reported cleanups across all fourteen parishes. That context matters, but the two should not be merged. Keep It Clean becomes credible only if the Association can distinguish its own verified results from the wider national effort, and the common reporting standard used on the day exists for exactly that purpose.
What follows the bags matters more than the bags. What comes next sets out the question the programme now has to answer.
The next Keep It Clean question is more ambitious than this year's: what did we learn about the waste itself? If the programme records only pounds removed, it measures effort. If it also records the most common materials, the recurring locations, the likely pathways and the sites that refill, it begins to measure a system. The national programme is built around marine-debris data for the same reason, and NEPA has long emphasized the value of knowing what accumulates where.
For the JHTA, the logical next step is to use repeat sites to identify the handful of materials that show up most often, then bring suppliers, recyclers, municipal partners and properties into a source-reduction conversation. The ambition is for the 2027 cleanup to report not only how much was collected, but whether the targeted categories declined. That is how an annual cleanup becomes destination management.
The action before Volume Three is simple: close the data loop. Every property or chapter that participated should submit its people count, waste count or weight, location, images and one lesson. The cleanup is over; the proof point is not.
JAPEX Social Responsibility Day put three very different assets on the industry agenda: a hospital, a recovery programme and a fish sanctuary. Together they sketch a more sophisticated definition of destination competitiveness.
St. Ann's Bay Regional Hospital is the destination's public-service infrastructure: a 308-bed referral facility serving roughly 360,000 people across three parishes, and a chapter Labour Day project for more than two decades. It serves residents and visitors alike.
Teen Challenge Jamaica is social recovery: a residential programme working with adults dealing with addiction, placing recovery and reintegration inside a tourism-industry frame. Chapter support has run through the year, not only on the day.
White River Fish Sanctuary is stewardship made visible. Delegates assembled coral nursery frames, attached corals, ran water tests and went on the water with wardens across the 150-hectare no-take zone that runs from Prospect Plantation in St. Mary to Hermosa Cove in St. Ann, guided by three words: protect, restore, engage. Its first five years reported fish biomass up 55 per cent and coral cover up 28 per cent: ecological indicators with a direct line to the quality of the coastal product.
The durable model is fewer one-off donations and more long-term relationships with assets that affect destination quality. A practical chapter portfolio holds three anchors: one natural asset, one community institution, one public-service asset, each with a named owner, a recurring contribution and one indicator of improving conditions.
Jamaica has validated a five-year Strategic Action Plan for the fisheries and aquaculture sector. For tourism members the question is not whether they fish. It is how this plan could reshape the marine space, seafood system and conservation finance around them.
Developed under the regional BE-CLME+ project with the National Fisheries Authority, the draft was validated by roughly 100 mapped stakeholders and is slated for submission at the end of October. It shortlists three financing options for further study: a cooperative revolving loan fund, parametric insurance, and a ring-fenced Tourism Enhancement Fund allocation for fisheries management and sanctuary financing.
That third option deserves the industry's full attention. It is a proposal for feasibility work, not an approved decision, but it makes the tourism-marine relationship explicit: policymakers are asking whether an existing tourism revenue stream should help finance marine stewardship.
Marine space will be managed more deliberately. Marine Spatial Planning is a key enabler, with implications for access, moorings, watersports and coastal investment.
Protected areas become an operating issue. Properties beside sanctuaries should know the boundaries, rules, managers and financing needs of the marine area they market.
Seafood procurement joins the story. Regional ministers have endorsed traceability; procurement evidence will matter more, not less.
Tourism holds knowledge the plan needs. Shoreline conflict, buyer requirements, storm damage: operational information planners lack.
The Association is consolidating a single structured submission for the implementation phase, so member input on marine planning, sanctuary financing, seafood sourcing and coastal access reaches the table in one credible voice. Send your issues through your chapter now, not after boundaries are drawn.
BIOFIN is not a new conservation grant. It is a process for determining what Jamaica already spends on biodiversity, what it needs, where the gaps sit and which financial solutions might close them. That makes tourism a participant, not an observer.
Jamaica convened its BIOFIN inception on September 23. The current phase runs two diagnostics: a Biodiversity Expenditure Review and a Policy and Institutional Review, both targeted for December 2026, feeding a Financial Needs Assessment in 2027 and a validated Biodiversity Finance Plan by December 2027. Globally the initiative now spans more than 130 countries and reports over US$3.3 billion in biodiversity finance mobilized since 2018.
The industry already pays for biodiversity in dozens of ways; it simply does not call the spending biodiversity finance. A hotel that funds coral restoration, supports a sanctuary, rehabilitates a mangrove, monitors water quality or finances environmental education is already investing in natural capital. The first job is not to ask for money. It is to count what we already do.
BIOFIN's first expenditure data collection closes October 16. A credible first record needs only: who spent, on which ecosystem, what kind of intervention, the cash and in-kind contribution, the partner, the result, and what cannot presently be funded. The Committee will consolidate member returns into one tourism submission.
WHY NOWCBD COP17 opens October 19 in Yerevan with the first global review of the Kunming-Montreal framework. The world is moving from targets to finance at the same moment Jamaica builds its evidence base.
Half Moon's submission for this issue is the useful counterpoint to the policy stories: what implementation looks like at property level. The resort commissions its Heart of House solar installation this month.
The detail most members should study is not the hardware but the financing. The system is deployed under a 20-year Solar-as-a-Service lease-to-own structure with Soleco Energy, requiring no upfront capital from the property. The sustainability question is increasingly not only which technology works, but which financing structure makes implementation possible.
Alongside the solar programme, the resort is preparing an enhanced circular-waste operation built on organics composting, green-waste chipping and glass crushing for reuse, with continued separation and employee engagement, framed not as add-on projects but as part of the property's return to full operations.
Technology, plus financing, plus an operational result. The feature grows more useful when the next update adds actual generation, cost, avoided grid use and diversion tonnage. That is the standard every member case in this Review will be held to.
Government intends to nearly double protected marine space within three years. Boundaries, management quality, enforcement and financing now belong inside destination planning. The model already exists at home: at Grange Pen in Lilliput, the National Fisheries Authority, the Grange Pen Fishers Association and Iberostar signed an MoU establishing a sanctuary that protects 3.3 million square metres of reef and creates more than ten local marine jobs.
Regional fisheries ministers meeting in Trelawny approved new policy directions covering marine spatial planning, illegal fishing and seafood traceability. For hotels and restaurants the medium-term implication is plain: species, source, legality and supplier practice will be asked for in writing, and procurement evidence will matter more, not less.
The UN Biodiversity Conference convenes a formal Business and Biodiversity Forum on October 25. Companies are increasingly treated as implementers of biodiversity finance, not patrons of conservation.
Launched this month at the Caribbean Investment Forum in Barbados, the Caribbean Sustainability Bond seeks to mobilize up to US$250 million for climate-resilient infrastructure, renewable energy, water management and environmental protection across the region, issued by Caribbean Sustainability Investments Limited, sponsored by the CARICOM Development Fund, with Jamaica's JMMB Securities as lead arranger and broker. The signal for tourism runs through this entire issue: resilience capital is being organized regionally, and the projects that reach it will be the ones with credible evidence behind them.
Practical member cases. Finance. Policy. Tools that travel back to the property. The symposium culminates a platform, not a conference: member surveying, case development and partner work come first; an Action Brief and a 12-month commitments tracker follow. Full date, venue and participation details in Volume Three.
The JHTA has opened the SunSeal feasibility pathway, but the first task is not designing a badge. It is deciding whether Jamaica needs a new destination-assurance system, who could credibly own it, how it would avoid duplicating existing standards, what participation would cost, and whether small tourism businesses could realistically take part.
The landscape review begins this quarter; consultation and cost analysis follow in the new year; the first-year destination is a controlled pilot recommendation to JHTA Council, not a public launch. The discipline is the story.
Eight dates that deserve space on a member calendar for the period ahead.
Phase One biodiversity-expenditure collection target. Members with conservation spending should have it documented.
The first collective global review of progress under the Kunming-Montreal framework.
Target for Jamaica's fisheries and aquaculture BE SAP and IPFA to incorporate validation feedback.
Adaptation, resilience and implementation: directly relevant to Jamaica's tourism asset base.
A natural communication moment for sustainable seafood and fishing-community partnerships.
Target for Jamaica's Biodiversity Expenditure Review and Policy and Institutional Review.
The symposium preview edition opens the new year.
The Climate Resilience and Sustainable Tourism Symposium; exact date to be confirmed.
Volume One asked members to send the work that rarely makes the brochure. Volume Two can make the ask precise. Before the January edition, the Committee needs two kinds of evidence above all:
Not another calendar of environmental days. Not another set of unmeasured commitments. A plan with owners behind it. Nature with finance behind it. And an industry increasingly prepared to show its work.
