Steph Curley glides atop the water on a 9ft, locally shaped long board. A sea turtle bobs among a couple of dozen surfers off a rocky headland in Noosa – dolphins frolic further out.
Curley angles her single fin towards the boulder-strewn point and paddles on to a two-foot wave. The wave breaks steeply at first, but as Curley swings her big blue board towards the pandanus palms and tea trees that line the shore and give the bay its name, the wave peels gently, offering up a long, luxurious ride.
The better surfers use these fun-size waves to practise party tricks, riding beside a mate, stalling their boards midwave or walking up to its nose and hanging 10 toes from the edge. Others just bend the knees slightly, lean back and take in the panorama through which they ride – lush eucalyptus and rainforest rising from the Pacific Ocean.
Curley, a lawyer by trade from the bottom island of New Zealand, who now lives on the Sunshine Coast and heads the non-profit Surfrider Foundation Australia, is no radical activist.
“I would chain myself to a tree for this place though,” she says.
Thankfully, Curley won’t have to be throwing herself in front of bulldozers at her local break anytime soon – previous generations of campaigners fought to protect this national park from development.
But she is gravely concerned for the future of surfing – and not only at her local break.
Research from Griffith University released on Wednesday shows Noosa is among the country’s most beloved surf spots that are on the frontline of what the Surfrider Australia CEO describes as “unprecedented threats” that may endanger Australians ability to access and enjoy the beach.
“Climate change is the biggest threat to beaches all across Australia,” Curley says. “It’s not just Noosa, it’s every single beach.”
Griffith Centre for Coastal Management emeritus professor Rodger Tomlinson, who reviewed and advised the paper, says its researchers scoured the scientific literature on predicted climate change parameters, from which they inferred the likely impacts to “surf amenity”.
“There is a huge amount of uncertainty on the impacts of climate change,” Tomlinson says. “What isn’t uncertain, what we’ve got a lot of confidence in, is climate change itself and, particularly, sea level rise. I mean, that’s a given.”
Because surf is dependent on the exposure of ocean swell to sea bottom, reef and point breaks are especially vulnerable to rising sea levels – essentially, the deeper the water, the weaker the wave.
“Point breaks in particular are at high risk and they make up our most famous beaches, particularly in the surfing world,” Curley says. “You think Bells Beach, The Pass [at Byron Bay] – any of the really iconic surfing spots – they’re made by point breaks.”
Another major threat to beaches around the world linked to rising oceans and increasingly severe storms is beach erosion. This is not a threat for future generations of surfers, Curley says, but one that is already destroying beloved breaks.
Curley points to Narrabeen where what she describes as “obscene sea walls” have been built to protect homes from coastal erosion. The vertical concrete walls – hundreds of metres long and seven-metres high – were built in response to a fierce storm in 2016 and “destroyed” the natural flow of sand beneath what was once a “really famous wave” on Sydney’s northern beaches.
“Narrabeen is no longer an endangered wave, it’s now a ruined wave,” Curley says.
It is not just sea level rise and erosion – the Griffith report lists a litany of threats to Australian beach culture in the age of climate crisis, from algal blooms to dirt and sewage washed into the oceans by increased floods and megastorms, to simple changes in swell direction.
“It doesn’t take much to change a beach with a subtle change in wave direction,” Tomlinson says. “And we know, given the nature of coastal processes, that things could change quite rapidly as we get accelerating sea level rise.”
Curley hopes the research can provide another wake-up call to take immediate action to stop extracting and opening up new fossil fuel projects and invest instead in clean energy.
But in addition to the big-picture approach Curley says is required, “if we are going to preserve Australia’s coastal heritage for future generations”, Surfrider Australia is pushing for highly localised efforts to protect beaches.
The Griffith study recommends designating key surf spots as protected areas, limiting development and investing in nourishing breaks that not only tap into a core part of the Australian psyche, but also pump billions of dollars into its economy through tourism and surfing.
And Curley said such an approach would see nature not as a problem – but part of the solution.
The report recommends the protection and fostering of sand dunes and vegetation as well as the creation of artificial reefs to improve wave quality and reduce erosion.
And because coastal management is “so complex and it’s so varied”, such an approach would involve funding “very localised research” and tapping into the knowledge of coastal communities and the people who spend every day in the water.
“A lot of people in the surfing community are really passionate coastal stewards and passionate coastal defenders,” Curley says.
“We’re the closest to it and if we don’t step up and we don’t take care of the coast – that we live in and love and appreciate every day – then whose responsibility is it?”
