Leo Douglas The globally threatened Yellow-billed Amazon is found at Pear Tree Bottom Zoom In

Victory for Jamaican conservationists?

12-06-2006

A Jamaican High Court judge has ruled in favour of the Northern Jamaica Conservation Association (NJCA), Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) and four individuals in a Judicial Review case concerning the granting of an environmental permit for part of a planned 1,918-room hotel in the Island's bird-rich Pear Tree Bottom area of Runaway Bay.

On 16 May, Justice Sykes quashed the environmental permit granted to Hoteles Jamaica Piñero Limited (HOJAPI) for Phase One of the hotel and ordered that the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) reconsider the application for the project. He ruled that NEPA and the Natural Resources Conservation Authority (NRCA) had not complied with the legal requirements of the decision-making process and had therefore acted unfairly in granting the environmental permit.

"This ruling is a landmark decision for the Jamaican environmental movement." —Wendy Lee, Northern Jamaica Conservation Association

However, in response to a request from the NRCA lawyers, the judge agreed to a 21-day stay on the revocation of the permit to allow the Respondents to prepare an appeal if they so choose.

In delivering his judgement, Justice Sykes found that NEPA had failed to consider all of the relevant environmental information, including a critical marine ecology report that was missing from the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). He added that given the undisputed high ecological value of Pear Tree Bottom, the absence of the marine ecology report was of "tremendous significance" to the decision-making process which the court was being asked to examine.

"There used to be many endemic birds in the forest including the Vervain, Mango and streamertail hummingbirds, and the globally threatened Yellow-billed Amazon parrot. Shorebirds and seabirds love the Pear Tree Bottom coast precisely because of the shallow back-reef and sand bars – the very habitat that the hotel wants to dredge in order, they say, to 'improve habitat'!" commented Wendy Lee of the Northern Jamaica Conservation Association (NJCA).