About

Good for the Planet is a website dedicated to looking after and sharing the benefits of surfing. Our focus is on wave quality, wave frequency and surfer safety (rage, crowding, water quality etc). Surfing is a major recreational and economic activity involving intimate human interaction with diverse coastal environments, and is expanding both in intensity in traditional locations, as well as in reach into new environments often in the developing world. This expansion involves environmental and social/cultural impacts, as well as engagement with mitigating these impacts and the impacts of other human activities.

Surfing is a multi-billion dollar activity with global participation estimated to be somewhere in the vicinity of 20 million people and growing every day. Kids in country towns hundreds of kilometres from the ocean dress and talk like surfers. Surfing as a lifestyle and activity is an investment in one’s physical and spiritual future and has the potential to deliver an economic future to many people.

Yet we are surrounded by decisions that negatively affect surfers and our surfing lifestyle. Surfbreaks are being damaged or destroyed though inappropriate development in coastal areas, the ocean continues to be polluted – the natural environment, the very thing that sustains surfers, the surfing lifestlye and the economy of surfing is being destroyed. That is our legacy. Unlike football fields, surf breaks can’t simply be reconstructed down the road.

Good for the Planet uses a range of socio-economic techniques to collect information about the value of recreational surfing to particular locales. This information is then combined with data collected through other sources and techniques by researchers at the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University and the Griffith Centre for Coastal Management at Griffith University. The broader studies examine the impacts of surfing on local environments (both natural and built), and the role of individual and especially organised surfers in shaping environmental perceptions, policy and management in specific locales i.e. protecting surfing amenity.

Importantly, the economic information provides valuable evidence of the net worth of surfers and surfing to particular areas and will be used to suggest to Government and Industry that not only should they embrace surfers and surfing but that its in their economic interests to do so.

This website has been privately funded by Neil Lazarow to serve as a data collection tool for his PhD research at the Australian National University, as a research tool for data collection at Griffith University and is intended to have a commercial application. The concept and design for this website was developed by Neil Lazarow, Mark Allen and Crimson Star Technology.

The owner of this site exercises his rights to Intellectual Property. No information may be used without the permission of the owner.