Courtesy photo.
CAMARILLO — If we want to protect ecosystems, try protecting the surf breaks.
That’s the gist of a 2021 research study, “Conservation Opportunities Arise from the Co-Occurrence of Surfing and Key Biodiversity Areas” led by CSU Channel Islands (CSUCI) Associate Professor of Environmental Science & Resource Management (ESRM), Dan Reineman.
“There’s a conservation opportunity ‘two-for’ here,” Reineman said. “We found that many of the world’s surf breaks are located in the same places as critical, but unprotected, ecosystems. Surfing – for recreation and tourism – provides an additional incentive to protect both.”
Reineman’s research inspired another study led by Oregon State University Assistant Professor of Forest Ecosystems & Society Jacob Bukoski, who discovered one more major benefit to protecting the surf breaks: trapping carbon.
“Dr. Bukoski reached out to me and said, ‘I’m interested in replicating your original study, but adding information about important stores of carbon around the world,’” Reineman said. “So I joined the team and we examined this additional co-benefit of, not only protecting surf breaks and ecosystems, but also keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.”
Bukoski, Reineman, and their collaborators found that these so-called “surf ecosystems” did indeed contain large amounts of carbon—88 million metric tons of carbon—that, once released, would be almost impossible to re-capture.
“If you destroy these ecosystems, there’s no way that you could ever regrow the forest or restore the mangroves by 2050,” Bukoski told Bloomberg.com. “So you can essentially consider that carbon as irrecoverable for climate mitigation purposes.”
Coastal watersheds and nearshore marine ecosystems, like mangroves and salt marshes, store large amounts of carbon in soil, sediment and biomass (living organisms). These ecosystems are also important for the biodiversity they nurture. Whether policymakers are conservation-minded or motivated by the tourism economy, if we protect these important ecosystems, the study showed, we can help fight climate change in a significant way.
Bukoski and his colleagues used an existing global database of irrecoverable carbon deposits and overlaid it with the locations of 4,830 surf breaks in 113 countries. Bukoski’s study found that, globally, an estimated 88.3 million metric tons of irrecoverable carbon was stored less than a mile from a surf spot.
Of this, 17.2 million metric tons are found in Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA)s without any current, formal measures of protection. In the United States, expanding protections could keep 13.7 million metric tons out of the atmosphere – a larger opportunity than any other country.
“It’s exciting to see scholarly interest in surf conservation growing, and it’s always great to see someone building on your own work and taking it in new directions,” Reineman said.
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY CHANNEL ISLANDS
California State University Channel Islands?(CSUCI) is Ventura County’s only public university and opened in 2002 as the 23rd campus in the?CSU system. CSUCI is located between Camarillo and the Oxnard Plain, midway between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.
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