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Dr. Cliff Kapono sometimes still surfs the way his Indigenous Hawaiian ancestors did 1,000 years ago, on a traditional wooden board and all. But the professional surfer and molecular biologist fears his descendants might not have the same privilege. The reason is the looming scarcity of surfable waves.
While climate change could be a boon for big-wave surfers, as some have highlighted, the beloved recreational side of the sport is endangered by the shifting climate. Dramatic changes are already locked in, with rising waters swallowing surf breaks and wary communities erecting sea walls that alter the shape of the coastline. But this tension — between the masses losing access to cherished resources and the few who benefit even as they lament — is not exclusive to surfers; it’s one that bedevils almost anything related to climate adaptation.
There are several ways climate change could jeopardize surfing, but the most dramatic is also the most counterintuitive: sea level rise could drown waves.
Put simply, surfing is made possible by the interplay of water and wind. Waves form as energy from gusts passes through water and underwater obstacles (shallower ocean floor, coral reefs, even a man-made jetty) trip them up, allowing the top of a wave to crest as the water below the surface slows down. Whether it’s surfable, however, depends on everything from the break’s geography to how high the tide is on any given day.
Models of future wave conditions indicate sea level rise could change the shape of waves that generations of surfers have relied on. A 2017 analysis of 105 California surf spots found that 34% are at risk of “drowning” by 2100, meaning the wave will break too close to shore or not at all. Just 5% of the state’s surf spots are expected to improve, the study found.
Erosion, which will alter the shape of coastlines, is partly to blame. But surfing’s precarity also results from the larger volume of water inherent to sea level rise. Many breaks perform best at low or medium tide; but in most places, sea level rise will push high tide higher while rendering low tide unrecognizable.
Accordingly, head of the Surfrider Foundation’s coast and climate initiative Stefanie Sekich said, “millions of people … will have their surf breaks drowned before their eyes.” Sekich herself has already seen a treasured and unnamed pocket break near San Diego swallowed up by erosion.
Climate change could also result in changes in the water quality that make surfing untenable, such as algal blooms that release toxins that kill fish and irritate swimmers’ skin.
Warmer waters also can stress the coral reefs that often help shape the most reliable surf breaks. This causes them to expel the algae living within them (“bleaching”) and leaves them at risk of dying off entirely.
“A balance and a natural flow that has existed over millennia is being disrupted as a result of human interaction,” Kapono said of this suite of effects. “And change is difficult for people. It requires either time or money, patience or adaptation.”
Determining how to adapt to this change, however, involves hard choices about what we value and why. Surf communities vulnerable to coastal erosion are being forced to weigh the risk that homes could slip into the sea against the risk that new infrastructure could upend a chief reason people seek to live there in the first place: surfing, and the lifestyle and natural splendor that goes with it.
Nik Strong-Cvetich, who leads the non-profit Save the Waves Coalition, argues that surf breaks themselves have unappreciated economic power. In the last 70 years, surfing’s spread has transformed it from a spiritual and social practice for small island communities to a global sport. But towns like his own Santa Cruz, California, do not account for ridable waves when it comes to erecting sea walls, breakwaters, and other manmade structures along the shore, even though the waves are the main attraction for many tourists and transplants.
This so-called “armoring” of the coast via cement structures designed to simultaneously block the waves and prevent the shore’s slip into the sea can negatively impact intertidal ecosystems and even hasten beach erosion. The California Coastal Commission, charged with protecting coastal resources and regulating development, has accordingly become choosier about where this armoring is allowed; in recent cases, it has required owners of new coastal properties to waive their rights to future sea walls to protect their vulnerable developments.
Still, a cement-forward approach to adaptation, Strong-Cvetich said, is among climate change’s biggest threats to surfing, and to the ecosystems and economies that go hand-in-hand with the sport. His organization, Save the Waves, argues for nature-based solutions to sea level rise, such as dune restoration, and for legally protecting surf breaks.
This latter point is controversial. For non-surfers it can sound an awful lot like prioritizing recreation over people’s homes. But if done well, Strong-Cvetich maintains, it is possible to both protect surfing and walk back people’s exposure to environmental hazards.
Both Save the Waves and Surfrider are joining those calling for the government to fund relocating some vulnerable coastal neighborhoods. This too is quite controversial. Several California towns have already considered and shot down “managed retreat” proposals, which many affected homeowners view as jeopardizing the value of their beachfront properties. Meanwhile, a California Legislative Analyst report found that sea level rise is projected to submerge $10 billion worth of property by 2050.
In the midst of any likely climate tragedy, there will be those that come out ahead. When it comes to surfers and climate change, one prominent story goes, the winners are the big-wave surfers.
For certain elite surfers, there may be some truth to this. The swells that launch the waves sky-high at breaks like Nazaré result largely from storm activity thousands of miles offshore; one of climate change’s knock-on effects is stronger hurricanes and surface winds, which cause those swells to carry even more energy within them. In fact, this has already begun to happen, with global wave power increasing 0.4% per year since 1948, according to a 2019 study.
In combination with sea level rise, this has the potential to fuel the monster waves that surfers like Garrett McNamara and Kai Lenny watch for.
Kurt Korte, vice president of forecasting for the surf report service Surfline, said the question of where new 100-footers could be found lingers in the back of his mind as his team monitors changing ocean conditions.
“When you see a storm system that does something a little bit atypical, or you see a shift in the general pattern from one winter to the next, you get … thinking about what that may mean,” Korte said. He expects that climate change makes uncovering the next Nazaré especially likely at higher altitudes: think Alaska, Western Canada, or Greenland.
This would be a boon for the extreme surfers that increasingly get the spotlight in documentaries like the glossy HBO documentary series 100 Foot Wave — and for the fans that devour footage of their work. But the rise of monster waves while gentler, warmer breaks are swallowed would represent a gradual sea change for surfing more broadly: from leisure activity to extreme sport, most accessible to those who can afford the training, equipment, and travel required, and increasingly unrecognizable to Kapono’s ancestors
But Li Erikson, a research geographer at the U.S. Geological Survey, notes her own team’s models paint a more nebulous picture of the big-wave future. While there are some places where waves are projected to grow taller (including at the higher latitudes), there are others where they are expected to shrink.
As is so often the case in conversations of the climate crisis’ winners and losers, treating bigger and better waves as a foregone conclusion betrays both a desire to simplify the phenomenon’s effects, and to focus on the not-that-bad-actually-perhaps-even-good elements of the story. While this might be an effective coping mechanism, it’s also one that threatens to distract us from adapting before it’s too late.
The reality of the surf community’s experience of climate change is one that mirrors our collective experience: A few will gain, while most will lose. For instance, the internet brims with articles on the few regions that will fare best when so much of the world weathers floods and drought and fires. (The area around the Great Lakes seems particularly promising.) And while climate change has already caused the number of people suffering from hunger in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries to more than double since 2017, a warming Siberia will see its lucky farmers able to produce new crops.
Preserving what we value in the face of climate change is complicated and often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what we stand to lose. But sticking our heads in the sand and relying on a sea wall to save us only promises to compound our grief. Adaptation is the task of stemming the losses, especially while resources still abound.
“There’s a finite number of people that are really impacted by the big wave stuff,” Korte said. But when it comes to the future of the smaller coastal breaks that have lured an increasing number of surfers into the water, he added, millions stand to lose.
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Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.