Climate change a planning reality

Nobody in Hawaii is ever more than a few miles away from the world’s biggest reminder of potential climate-change impacts: the Pacific Ocean. Rising sea levels are known factors in accelerating erosion of coastlines and property loss.

But according to a report distributed nationally this week, there’s an even more ominous warning: depletion of the islands’ drinking-water supply.

That and other projections should intensify the urgent calls to work toward what is already a difficult balance: environmental concerns on the one hand, and the pressures of growth and housing demands on the other.

The White House on Tuesday re-energized a broad, needed discussion about what to expect in the coming decades as the repercussions of climate change increasingly play out. No longer a dimly feared threat of the future, the effects of global warming are a present reality.

The droughts, floods, superstorms and other erratic events of recent years will only get worse, according to the 2014 National Climate Assessment, a study produced by a team of more than 300 experts. Among them is Victoria Keener, a climatologist and research fellow at the East-West Center. Keener was part of a project called the Pacific Islands Regional Climate Assessment, which published its own report in 2012.

Keener said that sea levels are expected to push salt water into aquifers that store the state’s drinking water, a problem made worse by an anticipated drop in rainfall, meaning less recharging of the aquifers.

A few of the other dire predictions tailored to the Hawaii-Pacific region in the assessment:

» Drought that parts of the state have experienced in recent years could become more intense.

» Warmer oceans are leading to increased coral bleaching and disease outbreaks, compounded by ocean acidification that will reduce coral growth and health. These stresses will affect coral reef fish populations and change the distribution of tuna fisheries.

» Native plants and animals will suffer in relation to invasive species as rainfall dips and temperatures rise. Agricultural yields also may decline.

None of this is precisely new information, but with each update of the climate assessment — roughly timed for once every four years — the data become more conclusive.

The Obama administration, which has moved gingerly around the political landmine of climate change policy, finally has fully embraced the issue as a priority with this assessment.

That’s a hopeful development — it’s still possible to moderate the degree of temperature increase, and continuing the drive to reduce atmosphere-warming carbon emissions ought to be a national imperative.

However, it’s really on the local level that the most immediate actions, that of adapting to the changes that are now unavoidable, must be taken.

Hawaii’s planning and scientific communities, from the Oahu Metropolitan Planning Organization to the University of Hawaii’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, are already quite engaged in this conversation. That needs to trickle down more definitively to the policymakers who decide how much development to allow, how much shoreline setback to require, what kind of water-conservation efforts to demand.

The shift away from fossil fuels must proceed steadily, and research into potentially crucial adaptation strategies such as desalinization should accelerate.

Further complicating matters, the chronic housing supply gap in the state is growing wider, with construction not keeping pace with growth. Narrowing the deficit, through more resource-efficient patterns of urban development, will be necessary, but always with a recognition that an island’s carrying capacity is not infinite.

The National Climate Assessment just underscored that fact in red ink. Climate change is real, and it is in the here and now.