The Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (JaBBEM) is sounding a second nationwide alarm about the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority Act 2026 (NaRRA Act), passed in the House of Representatives on 28 April 2026 that contains structural flaws that will expose tens of thousands of informal coastal landholders, fisherfolk, hurricane survivors, and generational beach-community residents to permanent land dispossession, without recognition, compensation, or legal remedy.

Jamaica’s coastline is home to hundreds of communities, including but not limited to New Hope, Black River, Montego Bay, Alligator Pond, Lucea, Rocky Point, Old Harbour Bay, Falmouth, Manchioneal, Little Bay, St Ann’s Bay, Port Maria and Belmont, where generations of fisherfolk and their families have lived on and worked the land without formal registered title. Under Jamaican law, this long, continuous, and open occupation gives rise to rights of adverse possession.

Adverse possession is not a legal technicality. Jamaica’s land tenure landscape is characterised by significant informality. For generations of Jamaicans excluded from formal land markets by poverty, inaccessible registration systems, and the unresolved legacy of colonial land distribution, it is the only realistic path to secure tenure. 

It is the acquisition of title through long, open and continuous occupation of land and the mechanism of last resort for communities to own land. The NaRRA Act does not abolish adverse possession, nor does it expressly authorise eviction. Its danger is structural and indirect.

An occupier approaching the 12-year threshold for a legal claim, perhaps 11 years and 10 months into possession when Melissa struck, has been displaced by the storm. NaRRA construction begins on their land. The limitation period continues to run, but their possession is broken. The clock ticks against them while they cannot occupy. There is no savings provision in the Act to suspend the limitation period due to displacement caused by the hurricane and exacerbated by NaRRA. There is no register of affected persons. There is no mechanism for them to be heard. And when the Authority dissolves, their land passes to the Crown without a single question being asked about who was on it.

JaBBEM’s analysis of the NaRRA Act identifies five categories of structural risk to informal coastal landholders:

• Unlimited Development Powers with No Occupier Protections (Section 4): The Authority can carry out construction “in, on, over or under land” anywhere in Jamaica not just in hurricane-damaged areas, without any obligation to identify or notify people already living on that land. A single act of construction on land being adversely possessed can permanently break the continuity of occupation required to perfect a legal title claim.
• Override of Planning and Zoning Controls (Sections 21–24): The Minister may issue “step-in orders” that override independent planning and coastal zoning decisions, the primary legal protections for beach access and fishing community land with no right for affected communities to be heard. Planning decisions that ordinarily require public notice and objection are replaced by a ministerial order made on the advice of experts selected by the Authority itself.
• Commercial Coastal Land Capture via “Strategic Investment Projects” (Section 25): Any private project exceeding USD 15 million, including high-value tourism, port development, and mineral extraction, can be designated a strategic investment project, giving private investors access to the full suite of NaRRA’s expedited approval powers and Public Investment Management System (PIMS) exemption. With no coastal community safeguards, this creates a structural vehicle for the commercial capture of hurricane-affected coastal land under the cover of reconstruction.
• Permanent Alienation of Coastal Land at Dissolution (Sections 32–34): When the Authority is dissolved at a date entirely within the Minister’s discretion, with no sunset clause all real property automatically vests in the Crown, with no process to identify informal occupiers, no claims mechanism, and no compensation. Displacement that began with the storm and continued through reconstruction becomes, at dissolution, permanent and irremediable.
• Removal of Social and Environmental Impact Assessments (Section 26): By exempting NaRRA projects from the Public Investment Management System, the Act eliminates the requirement for social and environmental impact assessments the mechanism through which informal occupiers and coastal communities are identified and documented before public funds are committed to a project that will affect them.

JaBBEM has filed a detailed Parliamentary Submission with the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Joint Select Committee calling for ten targeted amendments to the NaRRA Act. These amendments do not slow reconstruction. They ask only that the state look to see who is on the land before it acts and protect their rights to the land under Jamaican law:

• Insertion of disaster-related conditions and criteria for the Cabinet to approve projects that requires input from independent experts and consultation with vulnerable communities before Cabinet approval
• A statutory savings provision suspending adverse possession limitation periods for the duration of any displacement caused by the hurricane and exploited by NaRRA works
• Mandatory pre-development surveys and a register of informal occupiers and coastal community residents before any construction begins
• Retention of social and environmental impact assessment requirements and all other original components of PIMS
• Removal of step-in orders (Section 24) that permit Ministerial interference and ensure that the constitutional principle of separation of powers is maintained and that the technical and environmental agencies remain independent.
• A pre-dissolution claims process, with independent adjudication, for informal occupiers of land held by the Authority
• Free, prior, and informed consent from coastal communities as a precondition for strategic investment project designation affecting their land
• An express preservation of public foreshore access rights that cannot be diminished by any approved or strategic investment project●
• A statutory sunset clause with a maximum five-year duration, renewable only by affirmative resolution of both Houses and a published report on the status of informal tenure claims
• Amend section 4(2) to confine the Authority’s development powers to areas unconnected to hurricane damage
• Insert a new section containing right to appeal Ministerial and NaRRA decisions through the court

A pattern Jamaica cannot repeat

Post-disaster reconstruction moments in Jamaica and across the Caribbean have historically been used whether by design or by neglect to accelerate the transfer of prime coastal and agricultural land from community hands to private developers. JaBBEM is acutely conscious that the communities most devastated by Hurricane Melissa are disproportionately the same communities whose land is most commercially attractive to post-disaster tourism and hospitality investment. The NaRRA Act’s strategic investment project mechanism, with its USD 15 million threshold, its unlimited sectoral reach, and its absence of community safeguards, is structurally capable of facilitating precisely this transfer under the banner of reconstruction.

Hurricane Melissa destroyed our homes. The NaRRA Act, as drafted, could destroy our land right forever. We support reconstruction; we demand that the people being reconstructed are not erased in the process. A fishing village that moved from its beach to make way for a resort is not more resilient. It is destroyed more completely than any hurricane could destroy it because a hurricane leaves the land. Displacement does not.

Resilience is built from community roots, not destroyed by the very effort to restore them.

The reconstruction of Jamaica must be the reconstruction of Jamaican communities not the reconstruction of Jamaican land without Jamaicans on it.