The Climate is Changing.
Golf Courses Aren’t.
Seminole Golf Club boasts one of golf’s greatest courses. Abutting the Atlantic Ocean in southeast Florida, with four greens a stone’s throw from the shore, its routing is lauded as one the world’s finest. Even by the high standards of its designer, Donald Ross, Seminole is universally acknowledged as a masterpiece.
During your grandchildren’s lifetimes, it will be destroyed.
Few places on the planet are touched more dramatically by Earth’s changing climate than south Florida. Like everywhere else, its temperatures are rising. Its sea levels are, too. Rainfalls are becoming more pervasive, and flood waters more common. At some point in the next 80 years — perhaps as early as 2060 — sea levels will rise three feet above 1992’s mean average.
When that happens, Seminole will slip beneath the waves.
Climate change is no longer merely coming; for southern golf courses, as for everywhere else, it is here. Within the next two generations, it will claim seaside golf courses throughout the South, particularly in south Florida. In south Louisiana, rising oceans will put New Orleans’ golf courses — and the 1.2 million people living in its metro area — even farther below sea level, and more exposed to catastrophic flooding. But even farther inland, wetter rainy seasons and more oppressive summers will strain golf courses in ways that, quite literally, they never have seen before. Turfs will be stressed, and drainage systems tested, in ways that architects never imagined even a few years ago.
“Certainly, sea level rise is the most concerning for Florida,” David Zierden, a climatologist at Florida State University, told the Palm Beach Post in 2018. “That’s a problem that won’t go away. It’s inescapable at this point.”
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Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor make life on Earth possible. When sunlight hits our planet’s surface, it deflects back toward space. If all this sunlight radiated away from Earth, then global temperatures would be too low to support life. But greenhouse gases retain heat, and when sunlight reflects off the planet’s surface and back toward space, the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere trap a portion of that heat and distribute it back to the surface below.
Carbon dioxide occurs naturally, of course, but it also is a byproduct of burning fossil fuels. So when humans began burning fossil fuels in greater amounts beginning with the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere skyrocketed. Over the same period of time, average temperatures across the world began to rise. Scientists calculate a greater than 95 percent likelihood that the former is causing the latter.
The coastline of Florida, as seen today (left) and with sea levels three feet above 1992’s mean average 9right). Source: climatecontrol.org.
That doesn’t mean that climate change looks the same everywhere, though. In Florida, for example, the rate of sea level rise is 20 percent higher than the global rate. By 2050, that will mean at least 30 days per year of high-tide flooding for many cities in the Southeast, including in south Florida.
But climate change isn’t just a south Florida problem: a 2018 study commissioned by Golf Digest identified more than 1,100 golf courses in the United States that are less than two meters above sea level. Farther inland, higher tides pose no risk, but hotter temperatures and more concentrated rainy seasons will mean more insects and diseases for turf to battle through.
In other words, south Florida is Ground Zero, but no one is outrunning the blast radius.
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Nearly 700 miles north of Miami, in the North Carolina Sandhills, the warming planet’s costs take a different form. There is no rising sea to lap against these fairways, but that’s not to say that there are no consequences.
The North Carolina Sandhills are home to America’s most highly concentrated collection of world-class golf courses. Borrowing both the rolling topography of the Piedmont to the west and the sandy soil of the coastal plain to the east, it is the nursery that birthed Pinehurst No. 2, Pine Needles, and other priceless treasures. More so than perhaps anywhere else in North America, the region is uniquely suited for golf.
But here, as with most other inland areas throughout the South, the warming planet is creating a new normal. Over the past 100 years, total annual rainfall hasn’t changed much, but its timing throughout the year has changed: generally, autumn is rainier, and other seasons are drier (although in Mississippi, Arkansas, and southeast Louisiana, winter has become rainier too).
The Sandhills’ recent summers bear out that pattern. July is the region’s hottest month, and historically also its rainiest. But of the past 20 Julys, 14 have seen below-average rainfall; and in 15 of those Julys, average high temperatures have exceeded the historical average. In other words, the hottest time of the year is getting hotter — and with less rain, to boot. The brutal summers left courses no choice but to respond with tougher grasses: the day after the 2014 U.S. Open ended at Pinehurst No. 2, the resort began ripping up the course’s bentgrass greens and replaced them with more heat-resistant Bermuda grass. That same year, nearby Tobacco Road Golf Club did the same thing.
“Bentgrass used to be far superior, but now Bermuda grass strains are a lot better than they used to be and can offer a great putting surface,” said Morgan Stephenson, Tobacco Road’s superintendent. “I’m not gonna say it’s cheaper, but now I don’t go home at night worried about the grass dying.”
When it rains in the era of climate change, though, it will pour. Throughout the Ohio River Valley — the southern portion of which stretches from western North Carolina to western Tennessee, with portions of north Alabama and north Georgia included — rainfall intensity will increase over the next 20 years, which will inundate rivers and reservoirs. This winter, heavy rains soaked the region: February 2018 was the wettest February on record in the Tennessee River Valley, until February 2019 set a new mark. The historic rainfall required the Tennessee Valley Authority to make space in its reservoirs by diverting water into tributaries. When those already swollen creeks and rivers inevitably spilled their banks, you get the flooding seen recently at Sweetens Cove Golf Club just outside Chattanooga, Tenn.
At Tobacco Road, the course’s rolling terrain helps with most draining issues. But during cooler months, when Bermuda grass is dormant, low-lying areas get wet and stay wet because the dormant grass doesn’t drink up the water. Stephenson said he considered overseeding with rye grass, which stays active during cooler weather and could drink up some of the excess surface moisture. But in the end, he decided against it because of longer-term concerns about the turf’s health — and on top of that, the winter has been so rainy that he’s not sure he could have mowed it anyway.
“In this business,” Stephenson said, “you always just have to adapt.”
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No one will escape this problem altogether, but few golf courses have more to lose than Crandon Park.
Located on idyllic Key Biscayne four miles off Miami’s beaches, Crandon is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. The golf course’s 225 acres are valued at roughly $1.4 billion (with a “B”). It generates about 45,000 rounds per year and is widely considered one of Florida’s best public golf courses. But rising sea levels already are hitting it harder than most: in December 2017, when the moon orbited unusually close to Earth for the “Supermoon” event, tides rose onto five fairways at Crandon. Within the next 40 years, the entire course will be under water unless something changes.
So Crandon is changing.
Miami-Dade County, which owns the course, has developed a plan to get Crandon through two feet of sea level rise. Areas of the golf course already under siege by flooding will be ceded back to the ocean; and with the fill dug out from those areas, the County will raise 900 feet of cart path by about two feet. The cart paths surround the exterior of the golf course and effectively will act as a sea wall. Crandon also will add water features to receive additional rainfall.
The plan hasn’t been funded yet, but Steve Jablonowski, a PGA professional who oversees the County’s golf courses, expects that to happen in the next 18-24 months.
“I’m just a caretaker,” Jablonowski said. “My goal is to make sure this course is here for the next generation. If the problem isn’t solved by then, or if it hasn’t cycled off, then it’ll be their job to fix the course for the next generation after that.”
Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Fla., with precious little to separate it from the rising Atlantic Ocean. Source: Google.
Architect John Sanford, who developed the plan, considers it as much a matter of reducing the course’s environmental impact (and costs) as anything else. Sanford used GPS to track golfers’ traffic patterns at Crandon, and over time, the results revealed the course’s most infrequently visited corners. That information helped him identify 40 acres of turf that could be replaced with native, unirrigated ground covers. Taking out all that Bermuda grass will reduce day-to-day maintenance costs dramatically, and also will warrant less judicious protection from rising sea water.
Still, Sanford considers the changes less about protecting Crandon from climate change and more about preparing the course to get by with fewer resources.
“Rarely are we dealing with a course right on the coast,” Sanford said. “There just aren’t that many of them. The ones that are there, like Seminole — that would be a concern, because Seminole is a pretty low-lying course, but that’s not our project.”
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Crandon Park’s clear-eyed, proactive approach is the exception, though. Generally, American golf appears to be approaching climate change the same way it usually meets hot political issues: with apathy. Neither the USGA nor the American Society of Golf Course Architects maintains any guidelines for helping golf courses navigate the coming changes. The USGA points to a study from 2012-2015 into golf courses’ carbon footprints, but even this study misapprehends the problem: it is too late to prevent climate change. The horse is out the barn door; she can be slowed down, but she’s not going back in. The question is not whether golf courses can avoid climate change; the question is how they will handle it.
Without direction from the game’s leaders, neither golf courses nor architects are in any hurry to adjust. Of the half-dozen architects contacted for this story, only one said that he had begun designing around climate change. Even Seminole Golf Club, with a greater vested interest in finding a solution than perhaps any club in the world, apparently is winging it: asked whether the club had a plan to mitigate against more frequent flooding and rising sea levels, Seminole’s president declined comment. The architecture firm Coore Crenshaw, which has been overseeing a three-year renovation at Seminole, did not respond to multiple e-mails seeking comment.
The problem is not one that defies effort: in the United Kingdom, the R&A has begun advising courses to plan for decreased water availability, extreme weather, and changes in the lengths of growing seasons. And in 2016, the R&A unveiled a sustainability initiative called GreenLinks to decrease the environmental impact of the Open Championship; in less than three years, all 10 courses in the Open rota adopted the program.
The USGA has no program concerning climate change, though. It has two programs concerning conservation, but an individual golf course reducing its individual carbon emissions matters little to a crisis of a global scale. And ultimately, reducing carbon emissions can only mitigate climate change; it can’t stop it. It’s too late to stop it.
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Unpreparedness for climate change isn’t unique to golf, of course. Aside from building sea walls at his coastal resort in Ireland, President Donald Trump has shown no appetite for meaningfully addressing climate change — either to mitigate against its approach, or to prepare for its effects. Climate change’s most devastating consequences aren’t yet baked into the cake, but the window is narrowing, and one day that window will close (if it hasn’t already). Golf needs to prepare for climate change as a given, because it probably is.
The ocean doesn’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. A flood doesn’t give equal time to bogus counter-studies. The climate is changing — has changed. The planet is warming, and it doesn’t discriminate. Golf courses and governments alike can either prepare, like Crandon — or, like Seminole, they can wait for the coming waves to wash over them.
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