Kingston Harbour & Palisadoes Mangrove Restoration — Blue-Carbon Flood Defence for Jamaica's Capital

A 2019-launched study by the World Bank's Program on Forests (PROFOR), the University of California Santa Cruz, Jamaica's National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) and the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) quantified the flood-protection value of Jamaica's mangroves for the first time: they estimate the country's remaining mangroves prevent about US$32.7 million a year in flood damage to heavily settled coastline, and that without them annual flood losses would rise to roughly US$169 million, with over US$2.4 billion in coastal assets at risk.
On the ground in Kingston, NEPA and the University of the West Indies' Centre for Marine Sciences have been replanting white and black mangroves along the 16km Palisadoes strip protecting Kingston Harbour since 2018, restoring an estimated 6,000 square metres (roughly 6,000 saplings) to date, with the GraceKennedy Foundation contributing about J$5 million (~US$32,000) a year and the Netherlands-based Ocean Cleanup partnering on harbour clean-up (over 1,300 tonnes of waste removed since 2021) to reduce the plastic loads that smother young mangrove roots.
This is a genuinely mixed case worth reading honestly: Jamaica's mangrove cover fell from about 15,000 hectares in the 1970s to under 10,000 hectares by 2020, having lost over 2,000 hectares between 1989 and 2010 alone, and the restored area to date (well under 1 hectare) is minuscule relative to both the historic loss and even the identified restoration potential of roughly 690 hectares. Plastic pollution — some 578 tonnes entering Kingston Harbour annually — continues to constrain seedling survival, and a separate £5 million UK Blue Carbon Fund grant for a much larger Southern Clarendon mangrove reforestation project (outside Kingston) illustrates the scale of investment still required nationally.

Read the full analysis: https://jis.gov.jm/features/jamaicas-mangroves-worth-millions/