 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. And welcome to another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Likeable science is all about how science is a vital, dynamic, and interesting part of everyone's life every day and should not be relegated to the ivory towers or pushed aside for any reason. With me today in the studios is Matt Gonzer from the city and county of Honolulu here, right? The office of climate change, sustainability, and resiliency. So he is a coastal water program manager. Yes, welcome out. Thank you Ethan. Thanks for having me. Happy Friday. Happy Friday to you. And we're going to be talking about this office this time. And this is a great example of what likeable science is all about. The work you guys are doing is really critical. It's based very firmly in science and it absolutely impacts all of our lives here, right? The lives of going forward, people going forward, right? Absolutely, yeah. And I really appreciate your opening too because we're benefiting from some of that science. And I can talk about that once we explain a little bit more about the origin of the office. So if we go to one of some of the images, particularly the second image, you might remember back in 2016 there was a charter amendment proposed on the ballot. And resoundingly, the voters of this island elected to create a new office of climate change, sustainability, and resiliency within city and county of Honolulu's government. So Kudos won just to the democratic process and our charter commission process every 10 years. But also Kudos to all of us collectively for recognizing the need and the challenges in front of us and not shying away and not sticking our heads in the sand as it relates to the science. So that same charter amendment that created our office also created a new city commission called the Climate Change Commission where it's explicit that it's a five-member body made up of experts in the fields of climate sciences. So we're very fortunate. They had their first meeting just this month. And you can learn more about when those agendas and future meetings are coming up by looking through the city web pages, particularly our website, resilientowahu.org. And I'll just, I'll give you the names and the fields from the commission members. The chair is Dr. McKenna Kauffman. She works in the UH Minoa Department of Urban and Regional Planning. She's an economist, so she also works with U Hero, the UH Economic Research Organization. The vice chair is Chip Fletcher. We hear that name all the time. Coastal geologist, climate change and sea level rise expert. We also have Dr. Rosie Aligato, who is a microbiologist. And she works quite a bit with fish pond practitioners and other stewards of the land. So she brings that additional community-based work to bear. And Dr. Victoria Keener, who is with the Pacific RISA organization out of the East-West Center. And she actually is the main author and lead author for our Pacific Regional Climate Assessments as those contributions that go towards the national climate assessment. And last but certainly not least is Bettina Menert, who is principal and CEO of Architects Hawaii Limited, which is one of the largest engineering and architecture firms. So the science, the built, you know, we certainly will rely upon that information and there to guide both our office, the council, the administration. And we're just so fortunate to have that additional capacity and expertise. Sounds like a great team there. I know a few of them and I know all of the others. And that's what we need. I mean, we need good sound advice, experts, deliberating, sharing information in an open and transparent way and figuring out with all those different perspectives too. The economic perspective, the community's perspective, sort of physical sciences. All that needs to come into play, right? Absolutely. This is one of those areas where it's not a science that can neatly be siloed as biology or chemistry or geology or something, but it really shows how a lot of science does cut across all these different fields and ties into atmospheric science, environmental science, sort of applied sciences like architecture, and that impacts the community's well-being, economic stability. Right. And again, really striving towards informed decision-making. Certainly data and science until themselves are not always the answer or the solution, but they really enhance all of our collective comprehension of the challenges that we face. And we're certainly going to be developing more uniform language and we're all collectively as a community going to elevate our own understanding of the challenges and take them on as they come. And that's really additionally supported by an additional award that City and County received just a few months before the 2016 Charter Amendment, and this is the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilience Cities Initiative. Right. So this is sort of prestigious. I mean, there's 100 cities around the globe basically that are really stepping up and saying we're going to take the lead in dealing with, adapting to mitigating the impacts of climate change, right? Right. So the Rockefeller Foundation is a global philanthropy and one of the images shows a map of all the cities that were selected. It certainly doesn't, the selection criteria wasn't are you the most resilient city because that would almost defeat the purposes of this global learning network. And what they're really trying to learn are how are these global cities addressing 21st century challenges around urbanization, globalization and climate change. We applied each of three years, but we were finally successful in the third and final year. I think we're actually pretty fortunate in that case because some of those first round cohort cities went through all the growing pains of a new funding opportunity. But we're partners with cities like New Orleans, Louisiana, Norfolk, Virginia, Greater Miami and the beaches, all of these coastal communities that have similar challenges that we do. And what the award to the city provides is direct funding for the chief resilience officer who's also the executive director of this new city office. It provides a technical advisor who sort of coaches us along the way of this 100 RC process and provides that additional capacity. But it also provides access to over 200 private nonprofit academic institutions around the globe that we can tap into for specific pro bono services around some of the challenges that we'd like to zero in on. Yeah, again, it's one of these big complex problems and you need a lot of resources, a huge array of resources. It's not something that Honolulu can just look at and say, well, we'll solve this ourselves, even though there are problems and every problem in this sense is local. But nonetheless, we can learn from what other people have done and what they've tried, what hasn't worked, what has worked, figure out what options might be that other people are exploring. But it's also really important to recognize that it's not as if our city departments and agencies weren't working in this field. It's just that now there is an explicit office with these terms around climate change, sustainability, resiliency, and we have a specific charter mandate. But we're really benefiting from all of the dedicated hard work that these departments have been doing for years, just perhaps under a different lens or a different language. You can think about all of the great things around complete streets and bicycle networks, which are not just health and community and access, but they also provide options that hopefully can bring down our own vehicle miles traveled and our own greenhouse gas emissions. We might be a small contributor, but we're still a contributor in the global sphere. So we can't necessarily expect anyone else to change behaviors if we're not demonstrating the kinds of things that are beneficial for us globally. Absolutely. This is why our work towards becoming self-sustaining in terms of energy is so important that the goal of having totally renewable energy by 2045 is a very ambitious goal, certainly. But you've got to get out there and try and say, hey, we're committed to doing this. This is actually the 10th anniversary of the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative, that 2045 goal. Additionally, the four county mayors have committed to a 2045 clean ground transportation goal. So in the state, ground transportation accounts for about a quarter of our renounced gas emissions, so that's cars, etc. But it's also a significant expense for us to be exporting these dollars to import these petroleum-based products to just to fuel how we move about the islands. Additionally, Mayor Caldwell committed to a 2035 clean fleet goal. So recognizing that again, the city needs to demonstrate in its own practices and policies. And you might have seen this electric bus that's on loan zipping around town and it's just crushing all these routes and demonstrating that, yes, we can transition and the tools and the technologies are evolving. They're actually, even though maybe more expensive up front, the maintenance and the costs and the life cycle are cheaper and easier to handle into the future. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the beauties of an electric vehicle, right? It just sort of... Fewer parts. Yeah, over the long run, it just begins to pay off and pay off and pay off and you're not continuing to dump fossil fuels into it and spew them back out the tailpipe, right? Yeah. Well, that's wonderful. And I mean, there's a good... There is good underlying science that all this stuff needs to happen, right? I mean, every day we're sort of seeing some new piece of evidence that says climate change is actually happening and is actually real and particularly here on a small island. That makes a big difference to us, right? It can be overwhelming. Honestly, every day there is new information. But fortunately, we as an office, we can now rely on this Climate Change Commission to be that filter for us and to provide us the most contextual, most relevant information to inform our own county council, our office, working with the departments, et cetera. Because it is, it's overwhelming and I myself am a user of the information so really benefit from the folks that are doing the research of providing us the translation and the understanding they're of. Right, right. And it's not like they've got silver bullets coming out. All they're doing is sort of, yeah, they're gathering the information, analyzing it, interpreting it, figuring out, yes, what is the most relevant, the most useful, presenting good options, which then your group and others, I'm sure, have to debate on and figure out. Because in all these complex problems, right, there aren't simple answers. It's not just a yes, no, right, wrong. It's well, you know, Joe gains and Jim loses, you know. And there's an image that shows sort of a timeline and a process of some of our early Brazilian strategy work. And it's a both end. It's a balance because we also need to collect people's perceptions around some of these changes because there's a huge social component, a huge place-based local understanding of what are their stresses? What are their burdens just in day-to-day lives? So we're actually going out and doing community surveys. An online survey, we've been doing it in person at neighborhood board meetings, rotary meetings. We're equal pushers of information at this point because actually we're not just educating. We're receiving the knowledge that these people have and it filters into this preliminary resilience assessment combined with some of that more quantitative scientific data. We put it through the magic maker and hopefully a year from now we'll have this really robust resilience strategy. And that's actually what we're working towards in terms of the grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. You'll see more information coming out of our office around this phase one resilience assessment and then these discovery areas throughout this calendar year ultimately towards resilience strategy next year. Yeah. And you bring up a really key point. This is a classic example that science doesn't live in a vacuum. You have to have the scientific information, but it's very much a societal issue. And if the people for whatever reason don't want, won't take, won't tolerate electric vehicles, it sort of does no good to waste a bunch of electric vehicles off on them, right? You've got to have educated people to understand why electric vehicles for instance are valuable, why they're of benefit to the environment, why even with higher upfront costs they may actually be money saving in the long run, why they're sort of better for the island as a whole. And you have to bring the population along with us of raising everyone's awareness, right? Right. And it's not just zoning in and honing in on the tools or the what, but recognizing the why. And what are we trying to accomplish? And we're trying to accomplish clean green communities. We're trying to accomplish fiscally solvent households and fiscally solvent governments. And we're trying to preserve natural resources and access to and benefiting from those. And then you get into the how, right? Right. And so this is one of these very, very complex multifaceted issues where, yes, it's got economic, it's got cultural, it's got societal, natural resource, all kinds of pushes on it. So we really, and we, when we come back here, are going to dig more deeply into that. Right now, I'm told we need to take a little break. So Matt Gonzer from the city and county of Honolulu, the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency. And I'm, of course, your host, Ethan Allen, and we will be right back in one minute. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech, Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but also affects the aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech, Hawaii. Hey, Aloha. Stan the Energyman here on Think Tech, Hawaii where community matters. This is the place to come to think about all things energy. We talk about energy for the grid, energy for vehicles, energy in transportation, energy in maritime, energy in aviation. We have all kinds of things on our show, but we always focus on hydrogen here in Hawaii. Because it's my favorite thing. It's what I like to do. But we talk about things that make a difference here in Hawaii, things that should be a big changer for Hawaii. And we hope that you'll join us every Friday at noon on Stan the Energyman and take a look with us at new technologies and new thoughts on how we can get clean and green in Hawaii. Aloha. And welcome back to another episode of Likeable Science, part two of today's episode. And I'm here with your host, Ethan Allen from Think Tech, Hawaii. And I'm here with Matt Gonzer from the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, City and County of Honolulu. We're talking about what that office does. We in the first part talked about sort of how the office came into being, why it came into being. It was sort of created by the will of the people as it were. And it's gotten wonderful support not only sort of locally, but it's gotten support from the Rockefeller Foundation Honolulu is one of the 100 resilient cities around the world. Sort of helping to, as it works out to bar maybe, about what it takes to be a resiliency to what that really means. And that's, the issue of resiliency is perhaps less talked about, I think, than climate change or sustainability. But it's a really, the three clearly tie together. But resiliency is really key, right? And so it's maybe a little deeper into that. So why do we need to be resilient? Yeah, have resiliency or resilience can be a pretty heady, a pretty academic topic. But the way we're really trying to engage it is thinking about it in terms of shocks and stresses. And we spoke a little bit about that in the first part. And the hope and the objective around resilience for the office is to think about what is that grit that allows us to thrive, rebound, bounce forward, recover, adapt, manage whatever the shocks and stresses are. And that takes into play reducing our own burdens in our day-to-day lives so that we're happier, healthier, more socially connected, so that perhaps we can perform better in those moments of crises and we're better prepared to think about how to come out of those bad times as well. Right, because, I mean, the sort of issue with the stressors can be very sudden onset, some are long-term chronic, some are very sudden. Sometimes you get the one-two punch, a hurricane followed by a devastating fire or whatever. And we really, how a city reacts to them as a city, as a community is really critical, right? I mean, that does determine the sort of the healing and process, how fast that can happen. Right, and again, when we're going out and engaging with the communities, either through the survey or other talk story sessions, we're learning so much about the things that are their strengths and the things that make them proud and through the process, we don't necessarily only want to think about the things that we do poorly on. We want to ensure that we're acknowledging and validating our own community strengths and providing additional capacity and maybe doubling down on some of those so that we can really keep that community cohesion moving forward. Absolutely, we in education business sort of call that asset-based thinking rather than deficit-based thinking. You have a problem, you're like, look at all these wonderful assets you bring here. Maybe you need some more assets, but... We could use that kind of evaluation analysis, probably. And we're pretty preliminary in a lot of our goal-setting, which is not surprising considering that the majority of the office has only started within the last several months, even though the election that created the office was official on that election day, it takes some time, we again have tremendous support from the administration and also the council members have put that support forth. Right, so what sorts of these particular issues are you trying to... or are you focusing on? Because there sort of is, I mean there's almost an infinite number of potential stressors, right? There are resources and strengths within the community. You can't deal with them all. Right, so in again, the survey which we encourage everyone to participate on online and provide us their insights. We do have a couple of questions specifically around shocks and stressors, so we offer up about a dozen shocks and these are again those momentary things, hurricanes, tsunami, infrastructure failure, epidemic, economic crisis, and the trend has been that hurricane is usually the far and away winner in terms of their most concern. Right. And hurricanes bring all sorts of hazards and those hazards include high wind, erosion, storm surge, so it's also important to not just stay high level and abstract and really think about the consequences, but when we get to the stresses, that could be climate change concerns, whether it's heat or sea level rise, it could be just the fact that infrastructures aging, affordability challenges, intractable homelessness, that's where we get a little bit more of a mix in terms of people's perceptions of what's the biggest concern that they have. So, we're just in the process of analyzing what this information means for us, but look forward in the next couple of months for some of that assessment and you can actually sign up to receive our office's newsletter at RosalinaWahoo.org and we'll have our first newsletter out end of this month. Oh, excellent, excellent. That's great because again, this stuff needs to be shared, it needs to get out into the public dialogue and that's one reason why I'm so happy you're here talking with us about it because it's a really important issue for the city and the county and all of us here. It really does, as you say, I mean it impacts everyone literally from the homeless man on the street to the people living in the $20 million mansions. I saw a quote recently from New Orleans, their chief resilience officer talking about we could redo our infrastructure and be the strongest, most compact, resilient city, but if we still have income disparity and some of these other burdens we won't have achieved anything because it really is a balance and it's very easy for us to focus, it could be very easy for us to just focus on some of these hazards and some of these concerns because they could really knock us for a wallop with a long-term challenge, but we also need to think about all of the other things that are just the most conspicuous topics for people day in and day out. Yeah, and as you say it really demands broad input. How do you evaluate the seriousness of the stress of housing costs versus homeless people on the streets versus whatever you may have. It's beyond apples and oranges in terms of trying to compare them, right? Right, and the thing to remember is that it's not just our office so we work with all the other departments to have expertise in those areas and we work very closely with our office of housing, our planning department, our facility maintenance around the infrastructure, etc. And we're not really at an analysis phase or an evaluation of people's perceptions, we're just collecting them and we'll show more of that again in the next couple of months. I don't really have answers for you because we're just in the thick of it. No, that's what you've got to do. You've got to spend, I mean, it's like the old Albert Einstein dictum if you're given an hour to solve a problem you really should spend 55 minutes really figuring out what that problem is, what that real question is. That's largely what you're in the phase you're in is gathering that data, looking at the data, sifting through it, asking questions, maybe asking them a different way, trying to be sure you've asked everyone pretty broadly across the whole spectrum. Yeah, but if we just go through a couple of the images as well, the observations are just that and we have real good data here. Fortunately, we have great expertise at the University of Hawaii and long historical records around some of the science and some of the challenges. We had a very active I guess what I wanted to drill home is that I mentioned urbanization, globalization, but climate change is really the thing that is making it difficult to project and you can't rely on past information and it's just making things weirder. Weird science is one way to say it and it can make extremes more extreme, it can make periods of drought more extreme. We're having a challenge thinking about those long-term projections and that's why we're really fortunate again to have those individuals that I mentioned who are on the Climate Change Commission because they're the experts in those fields. The other one is to understand that this is not a linear projection from historical data anymore. It's a logarithmic or geometric growth phase where the amount of the impacts that we're going to see are screaming seemingly out of proportion in a sense to well, so what if the temperature has gone up another half a degree, but that next half degree means the frequency of these extreme events doubles or triples and their magnitude increases by a factor of two or three and so it's you've got to have people who actually understand this and keep us honest about it. These are choices we face. We can do A and face this consequence. We can do B and face this consequence, right? If we could put up, there's an image that shows a graphic of an island scene with arrows up and down and I wanted to make a plug for the Pacific Islands Regional Climate Assessment, so that's perka.org and again that's one of the lead authors is Dr. Victoria Keener and she's on the Climate Change Commission and some of that information is just a couple years old and we can go past this one, that's good. That just shows the greenhouse gas effect and that heat that's being trapped in our atmosphere is energy and that energy is making things weirder and we know it's changing conditions there and then also in our coastal zone, moving forward, we've seen less trade wind days, less rainfall overall and obviously sea level rise in our coastal areas and these trends are observable so we know what's happened we have a sense of what might happen into some time frame but then uncertainty increases as you move forward and we're going to collect that information and really benefit again from the expertise on the Climate Change Commission because just as you were saying, there could be moments in time that then chart you on a different trajectory and we have an abstract image of that that shows these different lines after a shock and we want to ensure that we're taking precautions and understanding to give us options moving forward. We don't want to bounce forward at some diminished state but there are a lot of things that maybe become opportunities after an event. How do we think about those proactively and prepare whatever mechanisms need to be prepared to put us on a good trajectory to thrive moving forward? Absolutely, that's what we've got to do is gather this evidence analyze it as best we can and try to figure out what to do. How is the best way we can be prepared for whatever it may be and we don't know, other than we know some general directions that things are moving but we don't know when the big hurricane is going to hit or when a tsunami might come. So we just have to be ready to jump in and cope as effectively as we possibly can. As you said, it's a very collaborative issue. It's not just one department one office. Yeah and in our office I'll just offer as we wrap up here this last image that shows really the launch of this whole activity was in the summer of last year it's called the Agenda Setting Workshop and this is Rockefeller Lingo and we had just that around 200 people doing the same kinds of activities and asking them the same kinds of questions around strengths, weaknesses, shocks, stressors this information is feeding into our online resilience survey. And you can find this information both at resilientawahu.org which also gives you the link to the online survey and we're just so appreciative of people providing us some time to share this information and to give us their insights. Well I appreciate your providing us the time to be here and share your good insights and as always I've learned a lot about the office here and what we're doing and it sounds like you're doing a bang up job so keep up good work and we'll get you back on here in another six months or a year. Yeah, that would be great. We're certainly going to have some updates moving forward. Excellent. Thank you so much Matt and I hope you'll join us next week for another episode of likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii until then.