Jamaica to run on 50% renewable energy by 2030
Jamaica set to run on 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030, up from the previous 30 per cent target.
Jamaica
Eight nations launch the International Coral Reef Initiative to protect reefs globally
The International Coral Reef Initiative launched in December 1994, when eight nations — from Jamaica to Japan — met in the Bahamas and pledged the first global partnership devoted entirely to coral reefs. Reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor but shelter roughly a quarter of marine species, and until then, no international body had spoken for them alone.
Jamaica’s Rastafari movement rises from the dispossessed
Rastafari took shape in early 1930s Jamaica, rising from Kingston’s poorest neighborhoods and the hills above them. Shaped by Marcus Garvey’s pan-African vision and the crowning of Haile Selassie, it gave Afro-Jamaicans a spiritual language for dignity under colonial rule. Today, an estimated 700,000 to 1 million practitioners carry that vision across the world.
Kingston, Jamaica rises from the ruins of the 1692 earthquake
Kingston, Jamaica rose from rubble in July 1692, when survivors of the earthquake that swallowed Port Royal regrouped on a patch of harbourside land called Colonel Barry’s Hog Crawle. Surveyor John Goffe laid out a grid with 66-foot thoroughfares, bones still visible downtown today. A capital born, improbably, from catastrophe.
Arawak people settle Jamaica, building a civilization of 60,000
Around 800 C.E., Taíno settlers reached a green, mountainous island they called Xaymaca — “land of wood and water.” Migrating up from South America, they built villages led by chiefs, farmed cassava in ash-enriched mounds, and grew to perhaps 60,000 people. Their words — barbecue, hammock, hurricane, canoe — still travel the world today.
Redware people arrive in Jamaica, becoming the island’s first known inhabitants
Jamaica’s earliest known inhabitants, the Redware people, arrived around 600 C.E. after crossing the Caribbean from South America through a long chain of islands. Archaeologists have traced them through the red pottery they left at coastal sites like Alligator Pond, where they fished and hunted turtles. Their arrival opens Jamaica’s human story nearly 900 years before Columbus.