When it comes to waves, there’s no one-size-fits-all impact sand dredging can have on a surf spot (or one that wouldn’t exist without dredging in the first place). The history of the Superbank is one massive tug-of-war between manmade impacts that were destructive to a coastline and manmade efforts to correct those same problems. The Tweed River jetties were main culprits blocking the flow of sediment along the coast and beach erosion completely transformed the area. Then, in the 90s, the Tweed River Entrance Sand Bypassing Project reversed those impacts and the stretch between Snapper and Kirra turned into the machinelike haven we know today. On the flip side of that same coin, in 2009, surfers in Florida won legal battles to protect their breaks in Palm Beach from a “beach nourishment” project on the grounds that moving sand through the area posed a major threat to the local ecosystem.
“Like other critics of beach nourishment, the surfers and their allies argued that unless replacement sand is well matched to the beach, which is hard to do, the sand causes problems, interfering with nesting sea turtles and small animals like sand fleas that form the bottom of beach and marine food webs,” Cornelia Dean wrote in the New York Times in 2009, outlining just one of the potential hazards created by dredging. “If the sand is too fine — a particular issue in this case — it can cause the water to become cloudy. And because the replacement sand moves around after it is pumped onto the beach, it can end up covering underwater rocks and coral reefs that are important to surfers, divers and anglers.”
According to a new report released this week, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) aligns with opposing dredging, saying the practice is devastating to the ocean floor and unsustainable. UNEP’s analysis came Tuesday as the result of data compiled through a new tool called Marine Sand Watch, which monitors dredging through artificial intelligence and marine tracking. Their data says that 50 billion tons of sand and gravel are used in construction and infrastructure projects, building solar panels, and more across the globe each year. Of that, they say an average of 6 billion tons come directly from sand dredging — enough that affected marine environments don’t have time to recover.
“This data signals the urgent need for better management of marine sand resources and to reduce the impacts of shallow sea mining,” said Pascal Peduzzi, the director of GRID-Geneva at Unep. “Unep invites all stakeholders, member states and the dredging sector to consider sand as a strategic material, and to swiftly engage in talks on how to improve dredging standards around the world.”
Peduzzi went on to compare dredging vessels to giant vacuum cleaners on the sea floor. “All the micro-organisms in the sand are crunched and nothing is left behind. If you take all the sand away to bare rock, nothing will recover. But if you leave 30-50cm it will recover,” he said, noting that we can’t stop doing it altogether because “our entire society is built on sand.”
