 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. What do we know? Okay. You may be wondering what we're doing here. Happy New Year, Jay. How about looking at the other people and look and see if they're wondering. They're not wondering. They know what we're doing here. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Hishigin Kwaile. Anyway, this doesn't come until February. But anyway, this is Think Tech Hawaii and of course Wednesday at four o'clock is Hawaii the State of Clean Energy, which is organized originally by Sharon Moriwaki, co-chair of the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and co-host of this show. Welcome, Sharon. Aloha. Why don't you do a little introduction of Chip Fletcher? Okay. Chip Fletcher, Dr. Fletcher is the associate dean at the EUH School of Ocean, Earth Sciences and Technology, long name, but they do a lot and his area of expertise is really something that we all should be concerned about and happy that he's doing the work. It's on climate change, on sustainability on the coastline, and he has very good data on the impact of disasters and what all hazards are impacting on the environment. And we're really pleased that he's taken this on and is actually a scientific advocate and we don't usually have those science advocates that can tell us that climate change really does exist and we really need to plan forward for it. So I'm so pleased that we have an ally today, but also to talk to the legislators on January 10th. January 10th. What is that? What is that? Thank you. Would you tell the people what is happening on January 10th? Oh, January 10th is the forum's briefing to the legislature on significant issues, usually it's on energy this year because of all of the need for good plans because we can't do things just willy-nilly. We have to really have good plans. You probably named that program Making Good Plans for a Sustainable and Resilient Boy. And it will be an exciting program and it will be one of the key knowlers on the panel will be Dr. Fletcher telling us all. So today we're going to discuss your slice of it, and your slice is different in my view because when we talk about making Hawaii sustainable, making it resilient, those are relatively speaking their intermediate or even long-term goals and it's plans that take a while to develop to the extent they don't exist already. But in this case, in the case of climate change, sea level rise, that's pretty fast, maybe not so fast as weather and weather-related disasters, that's really what we want to talk about today because that is by definition emergent. That is the short-term worrisome possibility that exists out there. That's right, extreme weather. As the atmosphere gets warmer, it holds more water vapor. This does two things. It creates more drought and it also creates heavier rainfall in places and it provides more energy to storm systems. The ocean is absorbing heat and CO2 and that's damaging our marine ecosystems. So here we are in the middle of the ocean, 2,500 miles from anything. We have to be resilient and sustainable and independent and capable of operating on our own but before we even get to that, we have to survive because all of that doesn't mean too much if you're not surviving. So the question is, how immediate is this risk? The risk of extreme weather, let's call it that, and how capable are we or can we be if we really belly up to this, to deal with extreme weather and survive because I think we're talking about human lives here. I think we are extremely at risk to extreme weather. I think that we are currently not capable to come out of it extremely well if they were, say, a direct hit from a hurricane but I think we have the capacity to prepare ourselves to be much more resilient. To me the term resilience means that you can't stop a hurricane or a tsunami for that matter but you can prepare yourself to come back faster once the hurricane event is over. And I see us as having huge vulnerabilities in several sectors, especially the electrical grid. We still have power lines all over the place even after Hurricane Aniki when there was a lot of discussion of hardening our power grids so that it would survive a direct hit from a hurricane. It doesn't seem like we have moved very far in that direction. We're vulnerable with regard to food resources every day. Our lifeline arrives in the form of Madsen and other shipments of food. We need to increase and invest in growing our own food. So the degree that we can come back from a direct strike of a hurricane with electricity hopefully to the point where it doesn't go out or gets brought back online extremely quickly and then can feed ourselves and have the medical supplies we need. Medical supplies. Yeah. And do you include water? Water. Absolutely. I have the supply of water. Yeah. So I mean these are all risks. And if you look at worst case analysis, we don't have medical care. We're in trouble. If we don't have water, we're in trouble even sooner. If we don't have food, we're in trouble in a couple days. Electricity. Yeah. If we don't have electricity, that's almost, think about it, that's almost immediate because everything collapses. It is immediate. And with electricity, you don't get water delivered to you and you don't get medical supplies delivered to you. And you go to the hospitals and they're running on backup power. And if you live in condos, you can't get out of your units. Yeah. People get stranded in the upper floors of condos because the elevator doesn't work and the water doesn't run. So compare. I hate to ask worst case analysis questions, but just to get all on the table here, compare what could happen here with a storm or a heat wave or some kind of natural disaster, weather-related natural disaster, and what happened in Puerto Rico. Well that's the scary comparison because Puerto Rico is going to be at least a decade, maybe more before they come back into having a full robust economy. All we have to do is look at Kauai and the hit it took from Hurricane Aniki in 1992. It was a decade before you could travel through Kauai and not be surrounded by evidence of that hurricane that occurred. If we get a direct hit of a hurricane in Honolulu, Aniwahu, it's going to devastate all the sectors of our economy, especially tourism. And for us not to prepare for that, given especially that the climate models are predicting that we will see more and stronger El Niños, and we know that the strong El Niños typically are accompanied by active hurricane seasons. The El Niño of 2015-2016 had a record-setting number of tropical cyclones. At one point in that summer, we were tracking three simultaneous hurricanes in the waters around Hawaii that had never been done before in the era of satellite monitoring. And there is robust science indicating that the zone of maximum winds, the zone of tropical cyclone movement in the north-central Pacific where we're located is migrating towards the poles. In fact, this is happening around the planet. The storm tracks are migrating towards the poles. And if you look at the tracks of past tropical cyclones that have come out to the north-central Pacific, they tend to pass south of the big islands, so now they'll be migrating to the north. So there are lots of reasons why we need to be a lot more active in terms of preparing ourselves for a direct strike of a hurricane. So it goes in the sort of groupings. Number one is the things I have to do to prepare to save myself in my home, my family, whatever. Two is what the community has to do to save community services like water and sewage. We didn't mention that earlier, but that's another one that's really deep on us. And of course, rebuilding, because if you don't rebuild, then the economic blow is just huge, and it could be in terms of preserving this island as a place to live, because I think Puerto Rico is really not being preserved as a place to live. People are leaving by the carload. We could lose Hawaii. We could lose Hawaii. We can't rebuild it fast enough, because remember 9-11, the day after 9-11 the beaches were empty, and they stayed empty for a week or two or three or more. No one was traveling. And if people read the paper about how Hawaii was devastated by whatever it was, they would not come, and tourism would be dead as a doornail for a long time. It shows how fragile our economy is. We are very vulnerable to global events, to world affairs, and imagine a direct strike or a direct event here in the Hawaiian Islands, even worse. The worst is that in Kauai it was like the receiving end of the headquarters city, right? The headquarters city could, Honolulu, could support Kauai and send food, whatever necessary over there. We heard a story about, what was it, in Kauai? Somebody sent a ship full of- From the military. From the military. It was carrying a ship full of supplies. Food. Food. Food. It was carrying a ship full of supplies. It was carrying a ship full of supplies, even because they were mad at the military. It was really silly. It was Carl Kim, the National Prepared Disaster Training Center and all that stuff. We're not sure that we can handle all that, what people know what to do. It's not clear. We're not certain that we could rebuild in time to resurrect the tourist industry. And if that happens, I mean, aside from all the people who get sick and die as a result of the event itself, these islands could become ghost town. Uninhabitable is what might happen without an economy. So, not going so doomsday on that. I just wanted to put that in the same way. Okay, okay. So, there is something that's prevented. We can't stop it, but is there a preventive? Is that the adaptation part of it? If we did certain things that we may not have such a serious strike, and then the resilience part, you know, the aftermath, then what do we do? I mean, are there some thoughts about that? Sure. And the research on that? Well, like I said, the electrical system needs to be hardened, if you will, is the term they use, and I probably want to do that in a place-based manner. Some places you would want to put the power lines underground. Other places you'd want them in volts that sit on the ground. Other places, maybe hurricane-resistant towers. There are other people that know more about this than I do, but something to harden our electrical grid. Accompanying to any hurricane is storm surge. Storm surge is actually the one element of a hurricane that is most fatal, leads to the most property damage and the most fatalities. That's a big wave. Yeah. Storm surge is where the ocean rises because of the on... Well, if you imagine a hurricane as a storm that is where the winds are rotating counterclockwise, as it approaches the shoreline, the vulnerable portion of the shoreline is in the forward right quadrant of the hurricane. That's where the wind is blowing on shore. So let's say you have 100-mile-an-hour winds. The storm itself is moving at 10 to 15 miles an hour, so over there the winds are 110 to 115 miles per hour, and the low atmospheric pressure creates a bulge of water. The winds create a bulge of water. The waves made by the wind create what's known as sea level setup. All that runs ashore, and you can get a storm surge of 10 feet in a Category 2 or Category 3 hurricane, taking out all of our shorefront homes that are built slab on grade. In other words, houses that sit on their foundations. So a simple change in our building codes so that new homes and homes that are being renovated would have some freeboard underneath them, up on post and pier, the water could run underneath. That doesn't wait. Waikiki's not built that way. Well, I mean, this makes sense for tsunamis. This makes sense for sea level rise. It makes sense for a whole number of hazards. But Waikiki will take its own sort of set of tools, Kailua, Waianae. Every place will have its own sort of place-based solution, but there are lots of tools to be applied. So what do you do with these high rises in the condos, for example, in Kakaako, which is underwater in your graphics, you know? I mean, what do you do with concrete and glass? There's no anything underneath, and there's a high sea level to begin with. What can be done? Well, you can put the power plant up on the roof rather than down at the ground level or below ground level. You can raise the walkways around the building. You can design protection. Well, not for protection, but so that you can move when it's high tide and sea level has come up through the storm drain system. You can design the first floor so that 50 years from now when that area is being flooded by high tides, such as we see today in Mapuna Puna, Mapuna Puna is a great natural laboratory for us. You can design the first floor of these buildings so that whatever is in there can be moved up to higher floors, and the first floor simply becomes a place where it's floodable, right? It accommodates the water. I see dollar signs hanging all over this. Very expensive. Billions and billions of dollars. And we are not yet requiring of the developers to build these adaptation steps in. And so the longer we take to make law out of these, the more billions of dollars we're committing to development that in the future will not be sustainable, not be resilient. This is really sort of a happy note. After that, let me take a short break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about the status of the planning efforts and your participation, a couple of commissions, and what they have done, what they are doing, what they might do in order to protect us. We want them to do. Okay, we'll take a short break. Come back for much more. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science, where we'll dig into science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and delight of science. We'll discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science, and care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great. It's all entertaining. It's all educational. So I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science. Oh, the steps that go up. The sidewalk is actually high. Yeah, it goes up. Are we on right now? No, not yet. Yes, we are. We're back. We're live. Yeah, okay. It's just a refresh. It's so exciting down the tube. That was a very important question, Chip. We are now, and we are. I want to answer that. Sharon Warki, co-chair of the Wai'anji Policy Forum, and co-host of this show, Chip Fletcher, the associate dean of the SOESTA at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. And technology. Very good. But we are talking about his role, his keynote, if you will, in a program next week in the Capitol, in the Capitol Auditorium, which you should consider coming to, which is one o'clock to four o'clock. One to four o'clock. Okay, on the 10th. At the Capitol Auditorium. Capitol Auditorium. And it's entitled Making Plans. Good Plans. Making good plans for a sustainable and resilient Hawaii. Okay. And Chip is one of the keynotes. And we're talking today about his special slice of that, because he deals in a lot of things, but one of the ones that we're really interested in is cataclysmic things. How do you sleep at night? Because we should be not only worried about it, but taking affirmative action. And since you and I spoke last, they didn't have those commissions dealing with sustainable resilience and protection. Now they do, and you sit on two of them? No. One of them? Yeah. There's only one that's been created. It's a state one. It's a state of Hawaii. The city and county is going to be creating a climate commission sometime in the very near future. Yeah. Okay. And so, I mean, I hope that works to have one of the city and one of the state. Sometimes we see them go in silos, you know. It'll be interesting to see how they work together. Hopefully they align. Yeah. But I mean, so the question of this segment of the show is, what have we done, at least since we spoke last? What are we doing? What can we do to really make this happen? You know, for example, a small thing, but in the Iniki case, a lot of roofs flew off because they didn't have those... Hurricane clips. Hurricane clips. Are hurricane clips a matter of code now? I kind of wonder about that. It's a good question. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Little things like that. If people don't think about it, they don't do anything about it. They put it off. They say it never happened here, but it will happen here. So what has happened and what is the process by which things can happen? So the Rockefeller Foundation has created a 100 Most Resilient Cities program around the world and Honolulu is one of the 100 Most Resilient Cities. They have had a couple of workshops here in Hawaii and they developed some terminology that I find very useful, shocks and stressors. Stressors are that high energy events such as a hurricane or a tsunami, a stressor is sort of a chronic background stressor that can wear away at a community. Like homelessness. Homelessness and sea level rise. Getting back to your question, the Hawaii State Climate Commission has just issued a sea level rise report, which was three years in the making under the direction of the Department of Land and Natural Resources and the Office of Planning. And this sea level rise report identifies the impacts of sea level rise under six inches of sea level rise, one, two and three feet of sea level rise. And they are proposing a new planning zone called the sea level rise extreme exposure area. Everything that the models indicate will be exposed to sea level rise impacts under up to 3.2 feet of sea level rise are being proposed as a new planning zone. And within this planning zone, the state legislature and the local counties have the opportunity to develop new policies in reaction to the science that suggests there are going to be negative impacts there. So what has been done? This report has come out. There have been solid proposals and now it's up to the constituents, the elected representatives to do something with these. So what kind of recommendations have you looked at the report in depth to know what kind of recommendations if I have a building there, am I to take it down, am I to do X, Y or Z to make that detailed in terms of recommendations? The report doesn't get into thou shalt do this. The report sort of provides recommendations at the 10,000 foot level, which I think is very smart of the report because it allows for flexibility and discussion in the different constituencies for, again, place-based decision making and place-based policy development. There are a myriad of things that one could do. You could elevate the homes. You could talk about moving the roads. You could talk about the impact of sea-level, excuse me, of seawalls on certain beaches that you want to keep. You could approach it from a triage point of view and say, you know, that beach is extremely important. It's more important than the road or the homes that are next to it, whereas this other beach is already heavily damaged by seawalls and the, you know, the cats out of the bag, let's not worry about that beach, and other types of steps to build a resilient community knowing that these are the exposure, the vulnerabilities that they have. Who makes those decisions? The commissions or the city council or the state legislature, who makes those decisions? I think the commissions are going to be providing recommendations and it will be up to the city councils and the state legislature. Recommendations are affirmative steps, though. Yes. Build a seawall. This location. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. There will be solid recommendations. Well, the recommendations in the report are, so again, they're at about 10,000 feet and there is more detail that needs to be added to that. Yeah. But the commission would do that. That'd be the next. That's not necessarily laid out. You know, I mean, I'm asking, for instance, if you have the county of Maui, I think that a combination of the planning department and the mayor's office at the county of Maui working with the city council, with the county council would come up with the specifics that would, that would, you know, work with the data that's in the sea level rise report, but it'd be very specific to Maui. Okay. Somebody would decide within, say, county government, and then it would be passed by the county council. Because it'll cost money. It'll cost money. It'll find the money. And if you have a lot of seawalls, that's a lot of money, lots and lots of money. And then I guess it has to, it's going to have to be public input discussion because some of the seawalls would be outside of the house. Democratic process, transparency, whatnot. And then find the money, get a contractor to it. And I doubt you could do it all at the same time. You'd do one by one, or segment by segment. And it makes me think that this used to be different if we were in China with Xi Jinping, or in New York in the 1930s with Robert Moses. It would happen virtually overnight. In our beautiful democracy, it doesn't happen overnight. We have enough time. Yeah. Government is messy in a democracy. A democracy is messy. Yeah. Yeah. But at least everybody gets to express their point of view. I say, Chip, getting back to the report because it's the most recent and substantive piece of work on what the impacts are and the red zone, so to speak. And if you're in that red zone, does it, does the report say, you know, you're required to vacate or you're required to nothing? It just says, these are the dangerous spots. Yeah. It identifies the danger zones. And when they become dangerous under one, two, and three feet of sea level rise, when will sea level reach one, two, and three feet? That is shifting science. We, in doing the modeling for this report, my research team adopted the intergovernmental on climate change, United Nations report that came out in 2014, estimates of when you'd hit one, two, and three feet of sea level rise. But since then, we've learned more about the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet and the Greenland ice sheet. And there are estimates that three feet of sea level rise originally thought to be a worst case scenario at the end of the century now might just be an intermediate scenario. So, you know, planners and communities need to be aware that the science surrounding these problems, hurricanes, sea level rise, what have you, is also changing and build that into how they develop policies. It also occurs to me that some of these zones that would be developed as a result of the report would be zones of private property, not necessarily all government property. Correct. In private property, then you have to deal with the owner of that property. You may have to condemn the property or somehow get the guy to buy into the program. And everybody will feel that it depreciates the value of the property. What have you, they may not believe that this is necessary and so forth. And there could be litigation about this, which also takes time. That's already playing out. Is it? Yeah. In addition to the counties, there is the state. And the state is responsible for the beach. And the attorney general just came out with the decision that as the shoreline, which is a legally defined term, as the shoreline moves landward due to erosion and sea level rise, the land reverts from whatever ownership it previously had to state ownership, conservation lands. And so that piece of property comes under a whole new set of rules. And we see this playing out today on Sunset Beach on the north shore of Oahu, where you have homes that are literally being undermined by the ocean. And there's a very vigorous debate as to is this a temporary thing? Is this sea level rise? What should you be allowed to build a seawall to protect your home? If you are, will that seawall damage the beach? Is this beach too important to allow seawall construction? What do we do with these homeowners that are in a world of hurt? Do you bail them out with willing seller programs with public funds that would buy the land, basically expanding beach parks or putting in new beach parks? Is it right to use public money to buy private property from people who knew they were living on the edge of the ocean? Controversy. And sea level rise has not yet reached that severe upward rate of rise that we're going to be seeing in the next couple of decades. It seems that policy should come out of these kinds of examples, so that when it does hit, you have something in place already. It really tests the wisdom and the cohesiveness of the community in general to survive. These are survival issues. And if we can't come to some sort of agreement, we're going to have chaos on our hands. Chaos on the shorelines. Which leads to chaos in the streets, actually, ultimately. So we only have a few minutes left and I wanted to pursue your thoughts because you've come out as the guy who wrote the charts about how we're going to be inundated. You've been studying this for, it must be 10, 20 years or so. I can make it older than you are. And you've been giving talks. You've been talking to government agencies in the public through the media for as long as I can remember, actually. And here we are. And we still do not have, in my view, a level of public awareness that is going to be meaningful as we get closer to the crunch. We're getting closer to the crunch. So I'm really interested in your advice about what we should do. There is nothing more important at this stage than public service announcements. I wrote a piece on this for Civil Beat last year. Radio, TV, Internet of various types. We need to be educating the public about what climate change means in Hawaii. Sea level rise, how strong El Nino's bring certain negative impacts to bear. The rising air temperature, the damage that's being caused to marine ecosystems. We have over 100 years of declining rainfall. We're going to have some areas where there will be more rain in the future and other areas where there will be less rain. Public needs to gain comfort in thinking about climate change so that they can begin assimilating the need for new policies and commenting on these policies and thinking to themselves how in the life that I lead and in my work life am I going to build in the need to become more resilient to climate change. If you had a public service announcement and you were speaking to the people what would be the first ground zero thing that you would tell people about climate change and what they need to know? Climate change is real. It's dangerous. I would in the space of a minute show them the peer-reviewed science how it goes back over 120 years to physicists and chemists in the 19th century. The whole history of understanding the anthropogenic greenhouse effect and the role that carbon dioxide plays. I know right there I probably got too sciencey but it can be laid out in very simple terms so that everybody can have confidence that this is a solid science as anything you can think of. It's a fine line though because you want them to have comfort in the knowledge confidence in their ability to do something about it. You want to move them to action intelligently. But you don't want it to panic. Because what does panic mean in this context? It means getting on a plane, selling your house, getting out of town, leaving. A lot of people do that. It's not good. So the question is how far can you go? This is a really sociological question. How far can you go before you hit the panic button? That's why public education. Once they become educated you avoid the panic because you're knowledgeable. And coming with the knowledge is the understanding that we can still respond to this problem. We can still build a healthy, vibrant future Hawaii. But we need to get going. Yes, in one way or another we're out of time too. Looking forward to your remarks next week. Thank you. It'll be very important. Looking forward to see you come back here on Think Tech and talk about... Any kind of media, we love to make people informed and raise their awareness. When the commission has something they're doing, we would really like to know that. And we would like to educate the public. So maybe the PSAs is not hard to do. We could do it. We have weekly shows. He has many other shows. Let's do them right here. Yes, we could do them right here. And put those videos out everywhere. Well, thank you very much, Chip. Thank you. I'm the associate dean of SOAS, the School of Ocean and Science and Technology. So enjoy having you on. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. I've enjoyed it. Aloha. Happy New Year.