Scotland's surf spots are at risk from climate change - here's why the 'un-jazzed' should care
As elsewhere in the world, the loss of popular waves in Scotland could have economic, social and cultural impacts, writes Roger Cox
Just when you thought that humanity must surely have finished the epic task of listing all the many, many things that climate change is going to make worse this century, along comes Dan Reineman, a researcher at California State University Channel Islands, with something else for us to worry about. As its title suggests, his recent paper “Globally significant surf breaks are vulnerable to climate change” is all about, well... how globally significant surf breaks are vulnerable to climate change. Not quite as big a deal, perhaps, as the impending collapse of the fragile ecosystems that currently support human life on this planet, but still, a bit of a buzz-killer all the same. If we are indeed hurtling towards the end of human civilisation as we know it, it would at least have been nice to catch a few decent waves before things started to go properly Pete Tong. Now, though, it seems we may soon be denied even this most innocent of pleasures.
Along with his co-authors Trent Hodges and Diego Sancho-Gallegos, Reineman looked at 57 different surf breaks in eight different countries and assessed their chances of long-term survival in relation to various different risk factors. The most obvious of these is sea level rise. Not all beaches, reefs and points are created equal: the places where the underwater topography is just right for surfing are relatively few and far between, so these spots are rightly prized by surfers. Trouble is, waves only break in relatively shallow water – a wave typically breaks when its height reaches between 71 per cent and 78 per cent the local water depth, so a one-metre-tall wave will break in water roughly 1.3 to 1.4 metres deep. Some of the surf spots Reineman and his team looked at are already sensitive to water depth, only breaking optimally at certain stages of the tide. So, with sea level forecast to rise between 0.38m and 0.77 metres by 2100, depending on the extent to which we’re able to curb our carbon emissions, it’s easy to see how some places that are surfing centres now might be pale shadows of their former selves in 74 years’ time.
Sea level rise is only the start of it, however – there are various other factors threatening the future of the world’s surf breaks, including “changes to mobile sediment supply and transport patterns” (what happens to those nice surf-sculpting sandbars if all the sand suddenly starts moving elsewhere due to changing ocean currents?); swell sensitivity (if a spot requires swell from a very specific direction, could it become less consistent due to changing weather patterns?); and shoreline resilience (is there potential for the surf spot to migrate inland as sea levels rise, or is there a cliff/mountain/sea wall/large block of flats in the way?)
The question most non-surfers will probably be asking at this point is: at a time when half the planet is on fire and the other half is at war, why on earth should we care about a decline in the quality of waves at a handful of surf spots? Well, it’s not a “my-climate-change-problem-is-bigger-than-yours” competition, but nevertheless, Reineman et al do offer some legitimate reasons to give a monkey’s. The one that will probably play best with the “legions of the un-jazzed” (as the great Pipeline pioneer Phil Edwards once described the non-waveriding segment of society) is economic: in many of the surf spots included in the study, the quality of the waves has created a very healthy local economy where there might not otherwise have been much going on. The global surf biz is now, according to Reineman, “a multibillion dollar annual industry facilitating economic development around the world.” It stands to reason, then, that in surf towns where the waves get worse, the local surf industry will probably also suffer.
Reineman and Co also talk about the damage a loss of waves could do to “distinct local [surf] communities cultures”. Again, non-surfers may chortle at the idea of “surf culture” but it’s as real and distinctive as the culture surrounding any other minority sport. Plus, as the paper says, “there are often strong connections between surfers and specific surf breaks that do not rely on the break’s quality.” To put that another way: surfers often become deeply attached to a certain local surf spot, even if the waves there are mostly mediocre. We’re entering the territory here of what the Shetlandic poet Roseanne Watt calls “bonhogas” – spiritual places that become part of a person’s identity. The International Surfing Association (ISA) estimates that there are approximately 35 million surfers worldwide, so if we start losing surf breaks, we’re not just damaging countless coastal economies, we’re also damaging the mental health of seven Scotlands, one Ghana or half a United Kingdom.
And in that universality lies the rub, because – as Reineman, Hodges and Sancho-Gallegos point out – it won’t just be the famous surf spots covered in their paper that are affected by climate change, it will be most if not all of them, famous and anonymous alike. “We hypothesize that similar risk profiles exist for many other unassessed surf breaks of global, regional and local significance around the world,” they write. Here in Scotland that could mean Pease Bay, it could mean Machrihanish, it could even mean Thurso East. Opportunities, perhaps, for further study.
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