Nothing beats the mental health benefits of a session like this, ‘cept cold hard cash. Photo: Jeremy Bishop // Unsplash
Most surfers will tell you that surfing improves their mental health, even after they’ve left the water. However, is there a way to actually measure that feeling? Moreover, can you convert the benefit of that feeling into a dollar amount? A new study published in the Nature portfolio journal NPJ Ocean Sustainability has attempted to do just that. In it, researchers at Griffith University on Australia’s Gold Coast and Andrés Bello University in Chile endeavored to estimate the economic value of the mental health benefits from surfing.
The researchers hoped to be able to make a case for surfing as a viable economic alternative to environmentally damaging coastal development. “Ocean sports such as surfing can provide critical economic and political leverage for the protection of coastal ecosystems, e.g., via surfing reserves,” states the study. “Currently, this leverage is rarely large enough to outcompete coastal development projects such as mineral loading wharves, boat harbours, residential resorts, or road bridges. We suggest that it could be increased by including the economic value of associated mental health benefits, derived from factors such as reduced healthcare costs and greater workplace productivity.”
The study built on previous work that had evaluated the economic benefit of the mental health boost people got from visiting national parks. These previous studies did this using two methods. The first converted each visit to quality-adjusted life-years (QALY), a metric used in the health care field that can be converted to a dollar value. The second estimated the financial benefit of increased workplace productivity and reduced healthcare spending. These numbers were then applied to the amount of times surfers visited the beach on average, using the Gold Coast in Australia as a case study. Of course, there is most likely not a one-to-one ratio of the mental health benefit of surfing versus visiting a national park, as the study itself noted. However, the researchers claim that, if anything, this might lead to an underestimation of financial benefit, as research indicates that skill+thrill adventure recreation such as surfing generates more powerful sensory and emotional experiences than contemplative experiences like going to a park.
The study concluded that mental health benefits contribute 57–74% of the total economic value of surfing (65–82% if multipliers were included). By scaling the Gold Coast sample up to apply to the 50 million surfers worldwide, the global mental health value of surfing was estimated to be USD 0.38–1.30 trillion each year. This wasn’t even taking into account the benefits of surfing on physical health, which could possibly add to that number. Though this number was still only an initial approximation, it indicated that the economic power of surfing may be far greater than previously estimated. Moreover, the sport “can thus contribute significantly to ocean sustainability” by providing a financially viable alternative to coastal development.
