Presentation
Projecting sea level rise impacts on waves and surfing
November 10, 2015
By Dan Reineman
International Congress on Coastal and Marine Tourism, Kona, Hawaii, November 10, 2015
Climate change and sea level rise will impact coasts, threatening infrastructure, property, livelihoods, and ecosystems, including beaches. Millions of people visit beaches each year, many of them to go surfing. Waves are critical physical components of these coastal ecosystems and are essential for the pursuit of surfing; surfers rely on specific places in the coastal ocean—surf-spots—where waves reliably break. Surf-spots are significantly valuable to the lives and identities of surfing’s adherents, who number in the millions worldwide, and to the identities and economies of many coastal communities. Waves and surfing are at the heart of a multibillion dollar recreation industry and individual surf-spots can sustainably generate millions of dollars annually for adjacent towns and cities. Despite their value as cultural and economic resources, the potential impacts on waves from environmental change and sea level rise in particular are, in many cases, poorly constrained. Most efforts to predict such impacts are either too unwieldy or too low resolution to be of use to coastal communities or to surfers themselves. Using the philosophy of a citizen-science approach, I surveyed more than one thousand California surfers to characterize the depth of their local knowledge about specific surf-spots. In order to surf safely and successfully, in addition to physical skills, surfers must develop Wave Knowledge—an understanding of the dynamic interactions of waves with the coastal environment. I combined Wave Knowledge with basic principles of oceanography to generate a projection for how sea level rise will impact waves on a surf-spot by surf-spot basis. My results suggest that in California, of the 105 surf-spots evaluated by three or more survey respondents, more than one third are vulnerable to sea level rise. These surf-spots are characterized as Endangered or Threatened based on their attributes: their future quality—and thus their utility for surfing and surfers—could be diminished or they could drown entirely by the end of this century. Five percent of surf-spots evaluated in this study could improve as a result of sea level rise. Coastal management actions not related to waves or surfing have the potential to alter the complex coastal processes and can affect waves, both directly in the present as well as through a coastal system’s innate capacity to adapt to rising sea levels in the future. It is possible that some Threatened surf-spots could survive in higher sea levels if these natural coastal processes are allowed to adapt unhindered. By highlighting these relationships, this study presents an important step towards bridging surfers, wave resources, and coastal management. Closing this gap entirely is essential to appropriately respond to and mitigate the threats that sea level rise, environmental change, and human activities pose to waves and to manage and protect these valuable cultural resources for coastal communities and future generations.
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International Congress on Coastal and Marine Tourism, Kona, Hawaii, November 10, 2015
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