The ASM Interview: Jess Ponting Talks Sustainability, Surf Parks, and the Future of Surfing
- Cash Lambert
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
If you didn’t already know, the surf park biz is booming.
From air ramps at Waco Surf (Texas), fun-sized lines at The Wave (UK), WSL competition-grade waves at Surf Abu Dhabi (UAE), barrel sections at the Surf Lakes (Australia) and more, there are 30+ surf parks around the globe pumping out quality — and really fun — waves.
No, this didn’t happen overnight. It’s been decades in the making, and one person who has had a front row seat to it all is Dr. Jess Ponting.
It's hard to find someone in the surf realm — and any realm really — who has such a celebrated list of accomplishments. If Kelly Slater is the king of world titles and John John Florence is the defacto king of Pipeline, Jess is no doubt the reigning champ in his speciality: surf research.
An Associate Professor and the Director of the Center for Surf Research at San Diego State University, Jess founded the world's first Center for Surf Research. He is also the Executive Director of STOKE, a sustainability certification for surf parks, and Interim CEO at Surf Park Central, which hosts the industry's annual conference, Surf Park Summit.
Since inception, Surf Park Summit has served as an annual meeting of the industry’s brightest minds and motivated individuals — people who are willing to do whatever it takes to create a surfable wave — and if you attend one, you’re bound meet Jess and learn a thing or two from his decades of surf research.
So how did a UK-born and Australian-raised surfer who lived in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Fiji complete the world's first Masters Degree and PhD on sustainable surf tourism? Why did he join forces with the Surf Park sector? What’s more, where does he see the surf park industry — and surfing as a collective — going in the future? We caught up with him for answers, and as Jess says, there’s a lot to be excited about it you're a surfer today. — Cash Lambert
ASM: Jess, what’s your first surfing memory?
Jess Ponting: I was about 5 when my newly immigrated parents from the UK took me and my brother to the beach at our new home in Australia. It was Christmas, and we had these inflatable air mats with two little handles on the front. We would ride waves on them from the moment we got there to the moment they had to drag me out of the water. This took place at Blackhead Beach; it has a special place in my heart.
How did your passion for surfing evolve from riding mats to studying surfing for academic purposes?
As I grew up, I was concerned about conservation of the areas that I loved, because I lived where there was extreme beauty with national parks and the ocean.
After I finished my undergraduate degree, I did the Australian version of Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea. I lived in a really remote village, bringing community development in the form of healthcare to villages that didn't really have much of it before.
After spending a year in a village where a house made of bush materials had to be constructed for me to live in — there were no shops in the village, no money, so whatever you needed could only come from the surrounding environment, including food — I jumped the border to Indonesia to surf for about a year. There, I witnessed coastal communities that were benefiting economically from surf tourism, but it was coming at an environmental expense with sewage, erosion and more. Also, at that time in the 1990s, surfers weren’t on their best behavior. There was drugs, alcohol, and other behavior that was acceptable in our cultural context, but not in conservative Muslim villages. I found myself feeling ashamed to be a part of the problem.
One day, surfing in Sumbawa, I realized the need to meet people where they were at, learn their language, talk to them about their own priorities and help them to achieve that rather than impose what your vision of what they might need is. This was completely devoid from the surf tourism I was seeing. I thought it might as well be me.
Realizing that need and then accepting its responsibility was a life-defining moment.
I came back to Australia and in Sydney started a master's degree in tourism management, specifically focusing on surf tourism. It turned out that no one had studied it before at an academic graduate level, so that was kind of exciting. There was nothing to research from, but at the same time, it meant everything I produced was either the first or amongst the first things that had ever been done.
It was exciting traveling to surfing destinations and talk to local communities and tourism developers, and I primarily focused on the Mentawais and how its surf tourism was being conceptualized.
After finishing my PhD at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, which included writing a surf tourism development plan for the government, I moved to San Diego State to continue my studies.
Three years after I arrived, I put in a proposal to start the Centre for Surf Research. During that process, I met John Luff, who had this dream about surf parks. I honestly didn’t know anything about them until he told me. He asked if I would help put on a conference on the surf park industry, which didn't exist at the time.
At the time, I had my baby daughter strapped to the front of me while we were planning it ... I remember being on calls and bouncing her up and down. She was born in November of 2012, and our first summit was in 2013.
My stipulation to John at the time was that I insisted on having a panel and session on sustainability. He was cool with that, and over a decade later, we’re still doing it.
You’ve had a front row seat to the Surf Park Summit since inception. How has the annual event evolved from your point of view?
It’s been really interesting. At the first Summit, there were about 200 people there, and the first few years, it was mostly people associated with the technology. In recent years, there's a lot more developers, investors, and land owners. It’s turned from simply building a surf park to now people are building a recreation facility or a real estate development anchored by a surfing attraction, which makes a lot of sense for investors. So they're having an easier time getting funded with that particular model for right now.
Over the years, we’ve also gone from a speculative “we think there will be more surf parks in the future” to people coming to the conference, meeting, and coming back the next year announcing projects that they'd put together with the people they'd met at the conference the previous year.
Surf Park Summit has become a really effective tool for people to find partnerships, launch projects and for suppliers to find the customers that they're looking for. If you want to meet people in the industry and get deals done, this is the place to do it.
Surf Parks have a complex history; in the past, the technology didn't live up to the hype. How as that specifically evolved from your perspective?
The change is directly traceable and I have the data to back this up. I did a survey at the beginning of 2015, post the opening of Surf Snowdonia. There's footage of the participants saying things along the lines of it was fun, but also weak.
For the survey, I asked people their impressions of surf parks, and then I made a word cloud out of it. The words including weak, lame, concrete, chlorine — all these kinds of things.
Then in December of 2015, Kelly Slater dropped his video of the Surf Ranch. I did another survey the following year, and all of that language had changed. It was no longer lame. It was no longer weak. And you saw it in the media, whereas before people were comparing the wave to nature, it flipped. People were comparing nature to the surf park.
The narrative flipped on its head overnight.
If I remember correctly, before that 72 percent of people said they would try a surf park and now it's basically 99.9% — there’s almost no one who doesn’t want to try it.
What has it been like to see the surf park sector grow from your, from your point of view?
I found it very exciting and then also somewhat frustratingly slow. I've been saying we're at the tipping point since 2013, and pretty much every year thereafter. But I think we're kind of post-tipping point now, finally.
At Surf Park Summits, I really enjoy being able to meet, talk with and hopefully be helpful to the incredibly brave people who are at the forefront of this industry, putting their economic and mental well-being on the line to develop these technologies and to bring parks into into the world.
It is not easy. I can't really claim any credit for any of it other than being a close observer of people inventing a whole new industry.
Hopefully I’ve provided some help along the way with data and ideas. Our annual global conference gives me joy every year, and it's great to see that grow every year and get increasingly global with each iteration.
Looking ahead, what are you most excited about with surf parks?
The sustainability integrations. That's always been my interest in the sector is to try and make sure that that's a part of the discourse, and there's so many new innovations ... it's all really exciting.
I’ve seen surf park developers leaning into sustainability because there's a lot of power that needs to be used. How do you get it? Can you use renewable energy? Water too: where does the water come from? Is it heated?
Sustainability is key not just for its own sake, but also for developers brining surf park plans to governments — they want to see a sustainable impact.
Part of that sustainabilty is practices that make surfing accessible to populations who haven't been able to access it in the realm of surf therapy. Beyond that, anyone and everyone can benefit from experiencing something like this.
What advice do you have for others looking to jump into the surf park space, because, after all, the business is growing so rapidly — many people want to jump on board.
Surf Park Central is a good first step, to engage with that community. We strive to be the Surf Park Industry Association. We’re active with our website, newsletter, and we have membership communities, and we have our upcoming annual Surf Park Summit this fall in Virginia Beach. We hope to see you there!
For more info on Surf Park Central, including their upcoming 2025 Surf Park Summit November 5-7 in Virginia Beach, check out their site.