Los Angeles (LA) County's coastal areas are highly valued for their natural benefits and their economic contributions to the region. While LA County already has a high level of exposure to flooding (e.g. people, ports, and harbors), climate change and sea level rise will increase flood risk; anticipating this risk requires adaptation planning to mitigate social, economic, and physical damage. This study provides an overview of the potential effects of sea level rise on coastal LA County and describes adaptation pathways and estimates associated costs in order to cope with sea level rise. An adaptation pathway in this study is defined as the collection of measures (e.g., beach nourishment, dune restoration, flood-proofing buildings, and levees) required to lower flood risk. The aim of using different adaptation pathways is to enable a transition from one methodology to another over time. These pathways address uncertainty in future projections, allowing for flexibility among policies and potentially spreading the costs over time. Maintaining beaches, dunes, and their natural dynamics is the foundation of each of the three adaptation pathways, which address the importance of beaches for recreation, environmental value, and flood protection. In some scenarios, owing to high projections of sea level rise, additional technical engineering options such as levees and sluices may be needed to reduce flood risk. The research suggests three adaptation pathways, anticipating a +1 ft (0.3 m) to +7 ft (+2 m) sea level rise by year 2100. Total adaptation costs vary between $4.3 and $6.4 bn, depending on measures included in the adaptation pathway.

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For the purposes of this review, we only discuss and consider impacts to wind-generated surface gravity waves on the ocean breaking in nearshore waters. The following non-technical summary of these processes is drawn from several sources, including (Garrison 2001, Hutt et al. 2001, Mead and Black 2001a, 2001b, Cool 2003, Scarfe et al. 2003, Butt et al. 2004, Espejo et al. 2014, Meldahl 2019). We divide the overview to focus separately on swell generation and wave breaking and also briefly summarize a variety of other factors relevant to breaking wave quality for surfing.

Supplemental Materials provided by authors for article "The impacts of climate change on surfing resources"

Surfing has increased in cultural, social, and economic importance through the last century and is now globally significant. Predicated on the natural phenomenon of ocean waves interacting with coasts, surfing’s future is threatened by Earth’s changing climate. This paper provides a comprehensive review of physical processes, including swell generation, wave breaking, and coastal dynamics, relevant for the locations — surf breaks — where surfing occurs and the myriad mechanisms through which each can be affected by a changing climate. We propose an organizing framework for these impacts characterizing them based on their mode of action as direct versus indirect, as well as by their magnitude, and conclude that some impacts (such as sea level rise) may threaten some breaks but on more protracted timelines, whereas other impacts (such as coastal armoring implemented in response to climate change) may pose more immediate, existential threats. This framework underscores the importance of local environmental knowledge of a given surf break for understanding its susceptibility to climate change and informs a Surf Break Vulnerability–Climate Change Assessment Tool (SurfCAT), designed to enable improved wave stewardship by local resource managers and stakeholders in the face of a changing climate.