Should Australia's surf breaks have legal protection?

Countries such as New Zealand and Peru already have legal protections in place that protect the activity from the impacts of water pollution, coastal erosion and flooding.

Former professional free-surfer Belen Alvarez Kimble said the sport not only had health benefits but brought people together.

"[Surfing] creates community, it creates friendships and it connects people with people who normally they would otherwise not have either spoken to or connected with," Ms Alvarez Kimble said.

Ms Alvarez Kimble started surfing when she was in her mid teens in the United States.

At the time her parents weren't supportive, so she would sneak out to the beach with her friends, hitchhiking if necessary.

"The culture within the lifestyle of the community, the connection, the environment was something so different to how I was raised," she said.

"So that's what broke down so many barriers of what I thought I was allowed to not do."

Ms Alvarez has spent her career encouraging women to start surfing, founding Salty Girls, a surfing school exclusively for women and girls, in 2007.

She said surfing teaches young women to grow as individuals and connected them with a supportive community.

"It creates a lot of finding oneself and trusting someone to guide you and help you and challenge yourself."

A survey of 569 Australian surfers by ANU found that 94 per cent believed the sport had a positive impact on their physical and mental wellbeing and 80 per cent believed it helped foster a sense of community.

The research also found surfing contributes almost $3 billion dollars into the economy each year, an estimate considered conservative at best, because it did not account for the money brought in by overseas tourists.

The average Australian surfer spends $3719 a year on surfing equipment and another $1858 on domestic travel.

Despite this, the health of surf breaks and potential harm to surfing was not thoroughly documented, according to the author of the research, Ana Manero.

"Surfing is practically invisible in [the State of the Environment Report], although it's Australia's second-most practised water-based sport and necessarily depends on the natural environment," she said.

Ms Manero suggested Australia's waves were an undervalued asset in the economy but said that things like biodiversity and Indigenous heritage should be protected even without assigning a financial value.

"We understand they're integral to our values as a society, they contribute to our human health, our wellbeing, we want to spend time in nature," she said.

Only 20 of Australia's surf breaks currently have any legal protection.

Bell's Beach is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register for its association with the surfing community but is one of only a handful of beaches with this protection.

In NSW there are 10 national surfing reserves protected by the Crown Lands Act.

"Those are discrete locations that have been identified as being significant for either their environmental or the cultural or other forms of values," Ms Manero said.

"We can develop additional policies that specifically recognise surf breaks for those to be included in the tools that we already have."

More than 75 per cent of the survey's respondents were concerned about climate change, coastal erosion and poor water quality.

Surfers for Climate Change CEO Josh Kirkman said climate change could force surfers to give up an activity that benefited their mental health.

"So many people rely on the ocean for their mental health that climate change, through more extreme weather events such as flooding, leads to a mental health impact."

"When you've got a flood that pollutes the waterways and makes it hazardous to go surfing, if you choose not to surf, your mental health suffers," he said.