 Aloha. Happy Friday. I'm Kawi Lucas with Hawaii is My Mainland. And it's kind of unusual for me to have the United States writ large on the show. But Honolulu has just been honored really with a huge, we have a huge opportunity. And this week, the Rockefeller Foundation sent a Katya, and I'm not even going to try to pronounce her last name, to begin discussions on what it means for Honolulu to participate in the 100 Resilient Cities Challenge. So with me, to discuss this, is Rob Kinslow, who is a sustainability coach. And Rob has been following this story, and he was at two meetings this week with Katya, and maybe you know how to pronounce her name. Cien Kuitz. Well, awesome. Thank you. So Rob, you are a sustainability coach, and you haven't switched over to a resiliency coach yet. Well, sustainability is just one step away from resilience. If you think of survivability, sustainability, resilience, and then restoration, that's kind of the pathway that we're on. And sustainability has been coming into prominence much more recently and now resilience has come in because resilience means the ability to adapt and respond to shocks to the system, either acute or chronic, and to return to some sense of normalcy, whatever normalcy is for that area. And sustainability really means to sustain and to have the next generation have the same resources and opportunities that we have. So you've been kicking around in this regenerative world for quite a while. And you've got sort of a very honored early start being part of the nine, the cohort. Would you want to talk about that with Al Gore's program? Well, I guess in late 2006, maybe this time 2006, I was watching Oprah. And she had Al Gore on. And Al Gore said, hey, I'm running this training in 2007. So I went online right away and applied. And I got selected out of 16,000 applicants along with nine other people or eight other people here in Honolulu. And we went to Nashville and were trained to talk about the science of climate change and the solutions to our shared collective challenges. In that case, it was climate change. And this is long before the consensus belief in climate change had even developed. And of course, we have some problems still with that today. But since then, I've been able to talk to many diverse groups and learn how to language the science and be a climate change communicator. So this new opportunity with the Rockefeller Foundation. So what does it mean to be selected as one of the 100 cities? And I think we have a graphic here that shows how they're really incredibly global. If you go to the website, which is 100 RC.org, you can see, oh, here we have one about this is this is the specific about the challenges. So these are the ones that were selected for Honolulu. Okay, the aging infrastructure. These are the Pacific. Well, let me talk over this a little bit if you don't mind. So I'll give you a little background while the readers are looking at that slide. The background is that in 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation saw the need and actually allocated $170 million to go out and kind of catalyze and encourage cities around the world. And they started in Asia, Singapore, Malaysia to encourage cities to hire and develop a so-called chief resilience officer or someone who can catalyze, facilitate and coordinate the activities of evaluating, developing a strategy from that a plan and and implementing that plan in every city according to the play space needs of each city. It's really interesting that they've chosen cities as the organizational level to focus on. Yeah, I can talk about that because see what has happened is that with the difficulty we had with the United Nations and the COP process. That would be the Council of priorities. Yes, you know, getting a climate change agreement, it took us 20 years or more. Funders and people who were in, you know, smart and wanted to really move a lot faster decided that they could go to municipalities and states, smaller organizations within those nations, didn't need the permission of the politicians at the national level. So kind of a grassroots, a group grassroots. Yeah, a group grassroots. Yeah, GGR, I'd like it. Yeah, and they've been wildly successful. There's been three cohorts, first group of 33, second group of 35, I think, and then Honolulu was selected as the third cohort, which actually puts us in a good position, because we can now look back at all the lessons learned and all the plans that other cities have already developed and are developing and merge them into our planning. So the, when I was at the expo, the World Expo last year in Milan, and when they were looking at the futures, that was the focus that the cities of the futures, municipalities would be rising in power and in importance. It was very interesting to have then this come to home. Well, and this is a central concept in sustainable development, is actually decentralization of power, decentralization of energy production, decentralization of food production. And to do that means that national entities will probably either follow or not follow these smaller municipalities and smaller regions. So maybe I should rethink Hawaii is my mainland to Oahu is my mainland? I don't know, we'll think about it. But anyway, so tell us about the Rockefeller Foundation, $170 million, that's significant infrastructure. Katja came here, there was a meeting at the mayor's office, what happened? Well, the mayor wasn't there, but the mayor was traveling. And I have to say that I was astonished by the amount of support and attention. There was every city department, there was people from the community, from UH, from the government, and from business there. And Hazard's Management, National Disaster Preparedness Center, representatives from other islands, and other, were there. There was at least 38 people there, and the room was filled. And they all get briefed. Everybody's interested in this. It's a huge shift from 2007 when I first started talking about climate change and other people. This is some critically needed good news on this front. No matter what's happening in other places, we've got our head screwed on right. Right. We have a lot ahead of us though. Okay, so tell us what this could mean, or tell us what sort of what the process is overall, and then what's next? Okay, so the process is really basically a funnel. And so we start out big, and we narrow our priorities to a plan and a strategy, and then we go big again in terms of implementation. So that's the basic structure of the plan. It goes from here to here, and it discovery into prioritization, and then into development. And so what that means in more detail is that during the discovery process, the CRO, who will get hired next year, will be selected next year. And he'll report to the managing director of the city. Okay. And he will then go out and start surveying and doing cross silo work, trying to break down, assembling all the plans. And this will then lead to a strategy of priorities, or a list of priorities. All right, Rob. Well, we'll come back after a short break and talk more about whether he or she, what she'll do here. There's a lot of women in sustainability, so I suspect that it will be a woman. Wow, okay. This gorgeous winter Friday in Honolulu is Rob Kinslow. And we're talking about a really amazing opportunity here that Honolulu has been selected as one of the 100 resilient cities by the Rockefeller Foundation. Okay, so what are we what are we going to get out of this? We just meant we were just talking about the chief resilience officer. Excuse me. Yes. We're going to have a chief resilience officer who will evaluate plan and coordinate across all departments and across the city and county of Honolulu funded by the Rockefeller Foundation funded by the Rockefeller for two years, yes, for two years. And with that, of course, will need to be some staff. So the city will have to come up with its own funding for the staff. But in any case, he will use the basic framework that we were talking about before the break to develop a resilient strategy, hopefully within the first six months to a year. By the end of year one, we should have a resilient strategy for the city and county of Honolulu. And that includes physical structure, social structure, and physical structure, social structure, and some of the challenges that we have to meet. So this is how they build Honolulu. The culturally diverse Hawaiian capital faces numerous climate and weather related challenges that could impair the tourism focused local economy, which could further increase homelessness. So this is how they put it together, but it was a team from Hawaii that had to apply from the mayor's office or I don't know that I wasn't involved in the application process. I only have been involved in the because I became the I was asked to be the point person for the Sierra Club on this project. I've only become part of it as the announcement came out. So I attended both meetings. I've done my own research. And so far, I'm hoping to be involved going down the road. Okay. And I did the specific challenges we had up before. And this is how the city of New Orleans, or specifically the I'm maybe pronouncing this wrong, a resilience district is this is what they came up with at the end. So these are the kind of things I guess, right? Yeah. So for example, you see community adaptation there. Now adaptation is a word that means that you're able to respond to a forcing function or a act of God or a hurricane in the case of New Orleans, and have a plan in place to deal with these responses. You go out and just survey all the possible things that could happen to you. And then you develop a plan for each one. And adaptation is different from mitigation mitigation is before the fact adaptation is after the fact. But you if you do an adaptation plan, then you can respond better after the fact. So there were quite a few sort of disaster related folks at the meeting at East West Center. Yeah, the subsequent one. Yeah. So that that has a role in this. Yeah. And what are the other what else will be getting as part of this process? Well, we have a robust disaster preparedness infrastructure in terms of people and all here in Honolulu at UH and in the city in the city. It's hazard mitigation, which covers some of these things. The challenge I think with Honolulu is we have multiple stakeholders. We have the military, we have the tourist industry, we have communities, we have government, you know, we have conservation people, we have terrain that rises and falls. We have cultural considerations to speak of. So we have a multitude of stakeholders that have to be brought into the process. And inclusiveness is one of the chief values of this effort. And so I would say that when it comes to, you know, questions like, are we going to let people in Kahala harden the coastline, you know, have seawalls when their beaches and their yards start being eroded away? Are we going to harden the beaches in Waikiki and what will that do with the sand? What about harbors and airports? And, you know, are we just going to put a big wall around the island like the Maldives have done? You know, how are we going to respond to these? So Katja spoke about Rotterdam and that I took a look at their website. Again, this was the 100 RC. They've just posted the strategies for Rotterdam. So she said that it's, they're living eight feet under sea level. And that they're doing it really well. So this is a really exciting thing to have the exchange, I think. Yeah, because that would be a nice lesson learned for New Orleans, for example, who is also below sea level, most of it using levies. And of course Rotterdam has a much more sophisticated because they've been doing it for much longer. So besides the resilience officer, we are also going to get some kinds of consulting she was talking about, too. Right. So the flow goes two ways. Not only is the flow coming, is the CRO going to have to bring in information from various cross-sectoral sources in government and academics and in community, but he's also going to be consulting with the Rockefeller Foundation and with the other cities. And for example, there's a summit that the CROs go to every year to exchange ideas and best practices so that they can cross pollinate each other. And as far as the sort of the takeaway on this, I mean, are we are we then going to have this CRO ongoing? Well, that's a question that is a political question. You know, who is going to be the CRO? I think that's going to be a political question. And I also think that if the forces of climate change, sea level rise, that we are anticipating arrive in Honolulu in the islands, you know, in the next 10 years, as we as science is telling us, then it will behoove us to continue this position across society and even expand it because every island is going to need one. You know, every municipality is going to need one. And of course, there's going to be staff and more green jobs that could arise from these efforts down the road. At the East West Center meeting this week, it was interesting to hear the suggestion made that the position be to go to an agency, an agency, a department, and I could see Kachi go, Oh, well, we've never had that suggestion before. So ever ever our own. I can see why that wouldn't work. But what do you think about the fact that that came up? Not just by one person, but there was about three people who what does that say? I think it says that there's a skepticism about one individual being able to integrate and coordinate. And fully express the needs of our multicultural, multi sectoral population. And what he was suggesting that decision making is so concentrated in that office that would lead to some sort of, you know, problems that we have in politics today. And so by having it, the suggestion was to have an agency be court that coordinate the CRO position, then you have at least a distributed decision making model in that office. So Kachi was attempting to lay these fears and said, well, you know, there will also be interns, right? So there was some kind of program. Yeah, so the concern was that we need to train the next generation. And a few years ago, the Department of Energy had a cohort of people, myself included, to come and learn geothermal energy from the previous generation. And then because they knew that intergenerational communication needed to happen. And so also in resilience, there was a suggestion that we have intergenerational communication, and we start training the next generation leaders right now with this opportunity. And I think our governor is an engineer, and I'm an engineer too. And engineers are the builders of society, and we're not often recognized as builders in politics. And so I think with an engineer at the helm of this state, we're going to see a lot more progress in this area than we would maybe with just a politician who might have to come up the speed when all of this science and not understand the actual building aspects of infrastructure resilience. So there's a very practical level to this too, as in actual things get done? Yes, absolutely. After the resilience strategy is developed after the first year, now you have to implement it in the second year. Now, of course, it's not going to get implemented in just one year. But we have a broad range, everything from forests to oceans, the concept that we all are familiar with, a lot of considerations to be taken into account there. I mean, do we harden our shorelines and then end up destroying our reefs just because we want to stay safe? Or do we retreat from the shoreline? Do we avoid? How do we respond to this threat of sea level rise? And I think Chip Fletcher over at UH is doing a really good job of modeling some of these things with respect to sea level rise. And Hawaii is actually on the leading edge, absolutely on the leading edge of this effort across the world. The leading edge of responding to climate change. Now, are we going fast enough? Climate change is an exponential force. Is our leadership going to be able to respond fast enough? Is our economy going to be able to respond? Is our workforce going to be able to respond? Can we include homeless people in this adaptation plan for resilience? That homelessness was part of that as we saw it early on. One of specifically Honolulu's challenges. And I thought one of the other responses was interesting that there was a gentleman who spoke to the, well, you know, it shouldn't be somebody from Hawaii because we have too many fractions and it should be somebody from the outside. And do you want to talk about her response? Yeah, her response was that, you know, she basically said you guys are going to decide who that person is. But she also said that, or actually, are you talking about the audience response or her response? No, her response. I don't actually recall her response to that. She was saying that in the practice so far, and they're already through two cohorts, if you bring in someone from the outside, there's a steep learning term. It takes too long for them to develop their relationships, to understand the complexities, especially in a place like Hawaii with our multi-ethnic and cultural complexities. And she was talking about some of the other cities and she said Seattle had 123 languages that you have to deal with in your adaptation plan. How do you communicate with those people? Because part of this plan strategy is a huge stakeholder engagement process, much like the Hawaii 2050 process we had, which really wasn't broad enough. You know, affordable housing. How do we incentivize people to not rent to the highest bidder and rent to people who actually live here? That's just a basic question that we're right now struggling with, but that's going to become more and more important as we respond to these economic forces of climate change. We're going to actually do this by choice, or nature's going to do it for us. And we should much better for us to do it by choice and have a plan and proceed down a path of inclusion for all our people. Do you have any sense of how this is going to play out in terms of, let's see, the politics of the position being in Honolulu? I'm not really a politician, although I'm an observer. I don't have any idea of how, I mean, are they going to hire on merit, on experience, on youth, on political connections, on cultural connections? Ideally, you would hire on somebody who's most qualified for the whole shebang. Was there any discussion of how the approach is going to be handled? So, in the mayor's office, he was saying, submit your applications now. Oh, oh well, all right. I didn't say how. So, I don't know how the process is going to go. I suspect it'll be like any other employment requisition. They'll announce it, and then they'll put a website up, and they'll ask you to submit, and we'll go from there. I mean, when it comes to city funding, there's really going to be no city funding until July of next year, because that's when the fiscal year funding begins. So, basically they have until July to... No, the Rockefeller Foundation money, of course, is supposedly coming in immediately. Oh. So, they can get started on, well, immediately, whether it's January 1st or immediately, I don't know. I can't speculate on that. That's not my... So, the clock is ticking, anyway, very soon. Yeah, very soon. It seems like the Rockefeller Foundation, we've been given the award, the grants, they got the money, obviously, so sooner we can get... And we're ahead of the curve, actually. She said that multiple times. She said Honolulu's ahead of the curve, because we even had this position, the Charter Commission position, already approved by the voters this past... So, that's... We're way ahead of other cities in terms of creating the pathway for this success in this position. So, those two things were linked? Yes, it seems like that, yes. I can't speculate, because I wasn't involved in the process. Maxine Burquette was very involved in the process, but I don't know. Well, we have a minute left, Rob. And so, in that last minute, would you just like to share maybe what you really hope to see and what we can do to make this... To maximize the impact of this opportunity? You mean Honolulu or we, you and me? Well, I would... As someone who has been a sustainable leadership coach and an advisor to UH and System Office and Maui Campus on organizational sustainability, I would hope that this leads to more jobs for young people, for myself, for other people in the community, green jobs. So far, we haven't really seen that the solar industry jobs are in decline because of recent discussions, decisions at the utility side and the government side. So, there's really no strong... There's some entrepreneur startup stuff that's very promising innovation. I think there was 10 million for the Green Growth Initiative and EGAS is going to ask for it. So, whether that will lead to jobs, I don't know. So, my hope is that this job will lead to a cascading effect of infrastructure jobs, a green growth jobs, a green building jobs of analysis, evaluation, measuring good jobs that will keep our people in the islands rather than offloading them. Oh, I love that vision. That so speaks to Hawaii being my main... I want to stay here. So, you know, I have a self interest in that outcome. Thank you so much, Rob. You're welcome. Thank you. Aloha. Aloha.