Dr. Dan Reineman of California State University Channel Islands teams up with Save The Waves and World Surfing Reserves to understand specific impacts of climate change on world class waves.
As surfers and ocean enthusiasts, we are the first to notice impacts to our surf ecosystem whether that is from impaired water quality, habitat loss, plastic pollution and marine debris, and increasingly, the impacts from climate change. While surfers know on an intuitive level that things like sea level rise and increasing storm activity will have an impact on our waves, it is important to also show scientifically how climate change will shape and alter our surf ecosystems so we can best prepare for the coming changes and integrate resilience into coastal planning.
Our newest published paper “globally significant surf breaks are vulnerable to climate change,” shows how the waves within the World Surfing Reserves network will be affected by climate change in different ways depending on a variety of factors including swell sensitivity, seafloor composition, shoreline resilience and more. In total, 11 World Surfing Reserves were analyzed representing 8 different countries including Portugal, Australia, Peru, Brazil, USA, UK, El Salvador, and Costa Rica. STW advisor, close collaborator and the lead author on the paper Dr. Dan Reineman utilized a tool he developed called the SurfCAT which is a series of questions answered by local surf condition experts that produces an assessment of what factors are most influenced by climate change.
This work builds on our previous project “Climate Vulnerability of California’s Natural Surfing Capital” in Santa Cruz where we found that all of the surf breaks in the World Surfing Reserve are highly vulnerable to sea level rise sensitivity.
This paper continues to build on our foundation of developing science based solutions to the threats to waves around the world.
A special thanks to Dan R. Reineman, Diego Sancho Gallegos, and the World Surfing Reserves network where over 190 local surf condition experts weighed in on the SurfCAT tool to give us solid and complete data to analyze for this work.
Please find the paper here: https://rdcu.be/fCpRE
