While the public sees us on the ground every weekend cleaning beaches, monitoring water quality, and restoring coastlines, tireless work is also happening on another front line. For more than 40 years, Surfrider has been a powerhouse for ocean and coastal advocacy - reaching decision makers and agencies with urgent messages on what needs to happen to protect what we love. It is through this effort that we have passed policies, what we call coastal victories (970 of them to be exact), that reduce plastic pollution, improve water quality on our beaches, stop bad development from destroying our coast, maintain public coastal access, and protect our beaches and communities against climate change.
What makes Surfrider unique from many other advocacy organizations is our ability to do this at the local, state, and national levels.
While we often win locally to pass ordinances and policies that advance our mission, we can only affect so many people at a time. When we win at the state level, that number moves to millions and tens of millions. If we make progress in enough states, we can shift the momentum nationally, affecting hundreds of millions of people, to protect our coasts and ocean.
Surfrider's advocacy in Oregon has led to significant wins in 2025 to protect our coasts and ocean
This year has been an incredibly impactful one so far in our state-level advocacy efforts, with 15 coastal victories across our initiatives. Here is a summary of our 2025 state wins.
In Oregon, Surfrider successfully advocated to protect and restore coastal access, strengthen the state’s bag ban, make it easier to clean beaches of abandoned vessels and debris, and protect water quality.
Meanwhile, in Washington Surfrider has also made a massive impact this year. Our network and coalition partners won the EPR Now! campaign to drastically reduce the amount of plastic waste entering the ocean by putting the responsibility of plastic pollution on the producer. We also won to ensure the public is advised about wastewater spills and to designate Bull kelp as the official state marine forest.
More of this, less plastic pollution in Washington thanks to Surfrider's EPR Now! campaign victory
In Hawaii, Surfrider worked to improve coastal restoration and resilience. In Texas, we helped to defeat bad bills that would weaken beach access in a state where public coastal access is enshrined in the state’s constitution.
Florida has also seen major wins in 2025. Surfrider helped pass bills that protect state parks from development including marinas, resorts, and golf courses and also prevented an egregious land swap that would have destroyed undeveloped land.
Florida's state parks needed friends this year and Surfrider stepped up
Surfrider worked also successfully to improve marine safety in Puerto Rico and improve climate change resilience and readiness in Maine.
In the remaining months of 2025, Surfrider has dozens more state-level campaigns to win across the country and thus continuing to build the momentum to affect national change. In a time of absent federal leadership for our coasts and ocean it is up to our states and advocates on the ground, like you, to make change. If you haven’t already, please join the movement today!