Cockpit Country is invaluable for many endemic Jamaican plants and animals as their last undisturbed refuge. It shelters unique flora and fauna that are threatened by a range of human activities, including illegal hunting of birds for food and for the pet trade, unsustainable collecting of rare species of plants, extensive logging for yam sticks and timber, and the conversion of forest to agriculture.

Forest clearance not only reduces the overall size of the forest and opens it up to external threats, but the associated fragmentation facilitates the spread of harmful non-native plants and animals. Clearing of the forest occurs most along the edges of the Cockpit Country made accessible by roads, which are among the greatest threats to the area’s ecosystem.

Roads facilitate illegal logging and open up corridors to sunlight and airflow, thus altering the microclimates of the cockpits. Since the flora and fauna of Cockpit Country are adapted to very high humidity, it is very important that these conditions be maintained, or many plants and animals will not survive even in remaining patches of forest. Frogs and butterflies are particularly dependent on the high humidity of the undisturbed cockpits and cave systems.

Roads also allow access to poachers. Plant collectors have caused the extinction in the wild of Cockpit Country’s only endemic cactus, Mammillaria jamaicensis, less than three years after the species was first described in 2003. A collection in Jamaica houses all the known individuals of this species, just 35 plants, grown from seeds.

 The illegal capture of Jamaican parrots for the pet trade threatens their survival in the wild, and snakes such as the endemic Jamaican Boa or Yellow Snake (Epicrates subflavus) are often killed on sight because of the mistaken belief that they are poisonous, even though there are no poisonous snakes in Jamaica.

Most significantly, however, Cockpit Country is now threatened by BAUXITE MINING.

Alcoa Minerals of Jamaica and Clarendon Alumina Production have applied for the renewal of a Special Exclusive Prospecting Licence, first granted in May 2004, to exclusively prospect for bauxite within an extremely large area of western Jamaica, including most of the Cockpit Country.