Surf Culture - Surf Tourism

Surf Tourism

The surf industry is a billion dollar industry whose popularity as a recreational sport has gained momentum in many coastal areas around the world over the past decades. With the publicizing of new surf destinations through television, movies, magazines, and the Internet, and other media, as well as greater access to traveling accommodations, surf tourism has created large impacts on local communities and environments in developing countries as well as in established areas around the world. Tourism is not always the main reason for fast expansion in developing countries, but under those circumstances groups of activists and non-profits such as SurfRider, SurfAid, IJourneyGreen, Surf Resource Network, World Tourism Organization, NEF, and UNESCO have begun working with locals and their governments to minimize the negative impacts of tourism upon host communities’ environments and maximize and equitably distribute the positive impacts of tourism. Some of the negative impacts of tourism relevant to surf dominant communities are:

• Failure to create adequate levels of employment and income
• Loss of local skills and failure to provide skilled jobs for local population
• Labor exploitation
• Inequitable distribution of the costs and benefits of tourism
• Fast, unstable development of infrastructure which can cause beach erosion and safety and health problems
• Improper waste disposal and pollution
• Lack of political will to pursue sustainable tourism
• Lack of resources both human and economic
• Central and local government corruption
• Short-term focus undermining long-term goals for development

Some of the positive impacts of tourism relevant to surf dominant communities include:

• The extent of linkages to the domestic economy
• The creation of employment
• Fostering of genuine appropriate technology transfer
• Generation of jobs for skilled labor as well as local managers, technicians, and personnel
• Equitable social, sectorial and regional distribution of costs and benefits
• Coordination of government policies and programs for locals and foreign visitors
• Infrastructure and incentives