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As some North Shore residents fight to keep their homes on dry land and officials in Waikiki pour tons of sand to combat beach erosion, a new governmental group aims to help people weather the impacts of climate change and sea-level rise in Hawaii for the decades to come.
Officials from 15 state and county agencies make up the new Interagency Climate Adaptation Committee, which is tasked with planning how the Aloha State might adapt to the encroaching seas and lowland flooding. Formed under a state law enacted in 2014, the group held its first quarterly meeting earlier this week.
"We know sea level is rising. We won’t be able to stop that," state Rep. Chris Lee (D, Kailua-Lanikai-Waimanalo) said Friday at a news briefing about the group’s undertaking.
"This is something that’s going to get worse with time, so we have to decide very quickly how we’re going to invest our resources, which beaches to protect" to preserve the state’s economy and way of life, Lee said.
Despite being the nation’s only island state, Hawaii is among the last to develop such a plan to deal with climate change, he added.
The committee’s first report, on sea rise vulnerability, is due to the Legislature in December 2017. Part of the reason it will take nearly three years to complete is that the group is waiting for the federal Army Corps of Engineers to release updated data on the state’s coastal topography, officials said.
In the meantime, local researchers already have a good idea of how much sea rise is stripping away the state’s beaches — and the outlook is grim.
Some 70 percent of the beaches on Oahu, Maui and Kauai are in a state of "chronic erosion," said Chip Fletcher, an associate dean and geology professor at the University of Hawaii.
On Maui alone as many as 90 percent of the beaches face chronic erosion, he said.
The beaches on those three islands are on course to erode anywhere between 1 and 80 feet by 2050, and 13 to 200 feet by 2100, according to a 2015 research paper that Fletcher co-authored in the Journal for the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards.
Fletcher said Hawaii could expect to see the extent of the erosion more than double in the second half of this century.
Sea-level rise in the last century is "a big part of why that’s happening," he said Friday.
Climate change and melting polar ice caused sea levels to rise 6 inches during the 20th century, with the oceans on course to rise an additional foot by the middle of the 21st century and somewhere between 2 and 4 feet by the end of the century, Fletcher said.
Three years ago the state, the owner of the Royal Hawaiian hotel and other parties spent more than $2 million to add some 27,000 cubic yards of sand to Waikiki Beach.
However, a UH study found that one-fourth of that sand was gone a year later, state Sen. Donna Mercado Kim (D, Kalihi Valley-Moanalua-Halawa) said in her remarks during the opening of this year’s legislative session.
Officials anticipate it will cost millions of dollars more in the next decade to further fight erosion edging Waikiki.
A 2008 economic impact analysis of the potential complete erosion of Waikiki Beach suggests the economic impact on hotel revenues could be as much as $661.2 million annually, with hotel industry job losses of 6,352 and lost visitor expenditures reaching nearly $2 billion.
The Interagency Climate Adaptation Committee aims to offer a statewide strategy for climate change and to report on how sea level will "affect our infrastructure, our harbors, our roads," said Sam Lemmo, an administrator with the state’s Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands.
The group will eventually look at other issues beyond just sea-level rise, Lee said, including dwindling rainfall and freshwater supplies.
"The best way to prepare for this is to start now," Fletcher said.
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Star-Advertiser reporter Timothy Hurley contributed to this report.
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