This article comments briefly on the origins of surfing and its growth through the 20th century, discusses the growth of participation in surfing, and then uses a range of social science techniques including observed market expenditure and nonmarket valuation to describe the socioeconomic value of surfing at various locations. The findings demonstrate the significant economic, social, and cultural importance of surfing amenity, the need to clearly articulate and measure changes in recreational amenity, and the need to consider any negative impacts on surf breaks and the natural environment that may occur as a result of development, coastal planning, and protection works.

No abstract

Humans are moving into urban areas at an accelerated pace. An increasing urban population fuels urban expansion and reduces nearby agricultural lands and natural environments such as forests, swamps, other water-pervious areas. Unsustainable development creates a disproportion between the growth of urban areas and the growth in urban population. The UN SDG indicator 11.3.1 specifically addresses the issue of the measurement of land-use efficiency. While the metric and methodology to estimate the indicator are straightforward, it faces problems of data unavailability and inconsistency. Vietnam has a record of tremendous economic growth that has translated into more urban settlements of size. Consequently, rural population movement into urban areas has led to many urban sustainable planning and development challenges. In the absence of previous work on estimating land-use efficiency in Vietnamese cities, this study makes the first attempt to examine land-use efficiency in Ha Long, one of the country’s fast-growing cities in recent decades. We mapped land use from high-resolution Landsat imagery (30 m) spanning multi-decadal observations from 1986 to 2020. An advanced machine learning approach, the Support Vector Machine algorithm, was applied to estimate the built-up area, which, by integration with census data, is essential for calculating SDG indicator 11.3.1. This study shows that the land-use efficiency metric was positive but small at the beginning of the considered period but increased in 2000–2020. These results suggest that before 2000, the urban land consumption rate in Ha Long was lower than the population growth rate, implying denser urban land use. The situation changed to the opposite when the urban land consumption rate exceeded the population growth rate in the past two decades. The study’s approach is applicable to regional and district levels to provide comparative analyses between cities or parts of a region or districts of the city. These analyses are valuable tools for assessing the impact of local urban and municipal planning policies on urban development.

Climate change impacts, sea level rise, and changes to the frequency and intensity of storms, in particular, are projected to increase the coastal land and assets exposed to coastal erosion. The selection of appropriate adaptation strategies requires an understanding of the costs and how such costs will vary by the magnitude and timing of climate change impacts. By drawing comparisons between past events and climate change projections, it is possible to use experience of the way societies have responded to changes to coastal erosion to inform the costs and selection of adaptation strategies at the coastal settlement scale. The experience of implementing a coastal protection strategy for the Gold Coast’s southern beaches between 1964 and 1999 is compiled into a database of the timing, units, and cost of coastal protection works. Records of the change to shoreline position and characteristics of local beaches are analysed through the Bruun model to determine the implied sea level rise at the time each of the projects was completed. Finally, an economic model updates the project costs for the point in the future based on the projected timing of sea level rise and calculates a net present value (NPV) for implementing a protection strategy, per km, of sandy beach shoreline against each of the four representative concentration pathways (RCP) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to 2100. A key finding of our study is the significant step-up in expected costs of implementing coastal protection between RCP 2.6 and RCP 8.5—from $573,792/km to $1.7 million/km, or a factor of nearly 3, using a social discount rate of 3%. This step-up is by a factor of more than 6 at a social discount rate of 1%. This step-up in projected costs should be of particular interest to agencies responsible for funding and building coastal defences.

No abstract