| UPDATE: March 25th, 2022
On March 17th, 2022 during the Budget Debate 2022, Prime Minister Holness announced both the gazetting of the Cockpit Country Protected Area (CCPA) under the NRCA Act and that the CCPA has been closed to prospecting and mining through a Mining (Prohibition) (Cockpit Country Protected Area) Notice, 2022. Included in the CCPA is an area of 841 hectares which was "Clawed Back" from Noranda's Special Mining Lease (SML) 173. All total, the gazetted CCPA covers 78,024 hectares. While legally closing a part of any area to mining is practically unprecedented in Jamaica, unfortunately even with this "Clawed Back" add-on, the CCPA boundary still doesn't make sense from the standpoint of Cockpit Country's cockpit karst morphology, hydrology, cultural heritage, and biodiversity. Click here to view the Jamaica Gazette Supplement, which includes a very low resolution map and narrative delineation of the boundary. Click here for a 4-page pdf of WRC's Dr. Susan Koenig's initial impressions of the boundary which now rather resembles Pinocchio's nose (or for those with a different childhood experience -- Mr. Burns from The Simpsons). Stay tuned for new webpages (including a comparison of the government's gazetted "Pinocchio" to the CCSG Boundary), once Dr. Susan receives an official GIS data file of the gazetted CCPA boundary. We still have the outstanding question: Is the CCPA boundary protecting Cockpit Country . . . or is it protecting mining interests?
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In November 2017 Jamaica's Prime Minister, The Most Honourable Andrew Holness, ON, MP presented to Parliament on the issue surrounding a boundary which would protect Cockpit Country from bauxite mining.
This 2017 presentation was grounded in "current" advocacy efforts to protect Cockpit Country -- these efforts have been running continuously by community stakeholders since 1999! -- and by a promise in 2007 by then-Prime Minister Bruce Golding to declare a boundary and prevent all mining in Cockpit Country. Click here for the 2007 letter from The Hon. Orette Bruce Golding.
The full title of the Prime Minister's November 2017 presentation was:
Statement by the Most Honourable Andrew Holness, Prime Minister to Parliament on the Delimitation of the Boundary of the Cockpit Country and the Cockpit Country Protected Area on Tuesday, November 21, 2017.
His speech is available online at: http://go-jamaica.com/pages/cockpit/#
Even in late 2018, there remains confusion over boundaries -- where they are and what they mean. We think this may be due in part to the low resolution of maps presented by the Prime Minister, which made it difficult to locate useful landmarks to "anchor" the boundary in a viewer's knowledge of the landscape. It may also be due to a misunderstanding that "the Cockpit Country" and "the Cockpit Country Protected Area" are not the same boundaries. That is, these names given by the Prime Minister are not interchangeable.
To clear-up our own confusion and to help the public understand what the Prime Minister said, we used Access-to-Information (ATI) requests to receive higher-resolution maps from Jamaica's Forestry Department (which produced all of the maps shown by the Prime Minister). We present these maps, along with several additional maps created by WRC's Dr. Susan Koenig, to highlight additional salient points.
Click on the text or image for full-size versions.
