This article was updated on September 2, 2025.

Hawai‘i isn’t often at the forefront of national policymaking, but its 2018 ban on a widely used but controversial pesticide set the stage for other states, the federal government and even the European Union to follow suit.  

With much fanfare, then-Gov. David Ige signed the bill into law in June of that year after a heated public debate in Kaua‘i. Residents there had raised alarms about seed companies spraying the pesticide chlorpyrifos on fields near schools. 

Now, a soft-spoken Kaua‘i pediatrician who helped focus state lawmakers’ attention on the health risks of chlorpyrifos back then is again sounding the alarm. 

This time, the showdown is over a seemingly innocuous 71-word section of the appropriations bill that the U.S. House of Representatives will take up this month following their summer break.  

“It’s a sleeper poison-pill,” says Dr. Lee Evslin, describing the provision that opponents argue could prevent Hawai‘i and other states from again setting their own pesticides restrictions.  

“Hawai‘i’s children and families live closer to pesticide spray zones than most Americans,” Evslin wrote in an appeal to the state’s congressional delegation. He urged them to scrutinize the measure, warning that it “would lock in outdated federal determinations, preventing timely updates that could save lives and protect vulnerable populations.” 

Opponents of the provision say it would also shield chemical companies from lawsuits by people harmed by pesticide use and would limit research that might document hazards posed by chemicals already on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s approved list, such as glyphosate, the prime ingredient in Roundup and other herbicides. 

“It’s so much under the radar,” Evslin says of the section of the bill, which has been overshadowed in Washington by higher-profile debates involving tariffs, tax cuts, immigration enforcement and Jeffrey Epstein files.  

“Tilting at Windmills” 

With lawmakers returning to Washington, one of the first orders of business will be to debate and vote on the appropriations bill. From his island outpost in one of the western-most reaches of the country, Evslin is hoping his single voice can add to a roar that is heard in Washington. 

He has sent letters to Hawai‘i’s congressional delegation, written articles and talked with those in his profession, hoping to convince anyone who will listen. 

“It’s huge, how [the health risks] can be so well documented, and there’s so little publicity out there,” he says.  

U.S. Representative Jill Tokuda, who represents the Neighbor Islands and much of rural and suburban O‘ahu, strongly opposed the measure. “This provision is a blatant giveaway to powerful pesticide manufacturers, shielding them from accountability while leaving families, farmers, and workers to bear the harmful consequences of toxic exposure,” says Tokuda, a Democrat, ahead of the vote. 

But the math is against Democrats in the House, where Republicans outnumber them.  

Evslin, who seems more at ease combing through academic journals or giving measured medical advice to a patient, muses at how he keeps getting pulled into the political arena despite his natural tendency to shy away from the limelight. 

“To some degree I feel like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills,” Evslin says with a chuckle. “There’s a part of me that’s unbelievably passionate about it, and there’s a part of me that looks at myself from a distance.  

“It’s a battle that I think is vital, and I understand that it’s daunting, and I tell myself, just do your best, take one step forward at a time.” 

Evslin’s work to raise public awareness caps a career that included roles as CEO of Kaua‘i Medical Clinic and later Wilcox Hospital, Senior VP at Hawai‘i Pacific Health as well as private practices as a general pediatrician and sports medicine/wellness clinic physician.  

He has drafted testimony for the American Academy of Pediatrics, has written columns for local newspapers and was a keynote speaker at the 2022 U.N. General Assembly Science Summit. 

Evslin says he tried to pull away from medicine during a stint as a small-scale farmer on the Garden Isle after he retired, but science kept pulling him back. He says he was drawn to an increasing number of studies that showed medical hazards from chronic exposure to chemicals that are used in Hawai‘i at much-higher levels than on the mainland. 

That’s when he bumped into less familiar territory of politics, where even the immutable laws of science are often treated merely as cards that can be traded in fungible transactions for personal, professional or partisan gain. 

“At times I say to myself, ‘Am I nuts? I’m happily retired and have nine grandchildren. Why am I even doing this?’ But it feels so right to me, and I’ve become moderately knowledgeable. I feel that I should speak out.” 

Evslin says he was at first a reluctant traveler in the campaign to ban or restrict certain uses of pesticides. He didn’t focus on pesticides – a catch-all category that also includes herbicides, insecticides and fungicides – until reading two papers in 2012 by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which reported on the health threats of chronic low-level exposure to pesticides. 

“I’ve always been interested in why some people are healthy and some are not,” Evslin explains. “That’s been a thread of my career and looking at what you can do about it.” 

“So, when these papers came out, that was a game-changer to a certain degree to pediatric thinking.” Up to that point, he says, pediatricians were taught to treat acute poisoning – accidental spray exposure or consuming a pesticide.  

“If someone called me and said they took something, the first thing I would do is call the poison control center because they had the data at their fingertips” and could most quickly treat the immediate symptoms. 

He adds: “The idea of chronic, low-level exposure to pesticides being dangerous just hadn’t been something I or most pediatricians thought about.” 

That was about to change. 

Three Growing Seasons a Year 

Hawai‘i has played a critical role in the development of crop seeds that are sold by major companies around the world and become, literally, the source of much of the food consumed on the planet. That’s because those multinational seed companies – through complicated genetic engineering and hybrid techniques – need to test their creations before receiving regulatory approval. Currently, that means they need to show the seeds have performed through three growing seasons.  

Because of its geographic location and benevolent climate, Hawai‘i is one of the few places in the United States that offers seed growers such favorable conditions. Companies such as Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont Pioneer and BASF Plant Science were drawn to the ideal farmland on Kaua‘i to develop new seed strains, while Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, concentrates its farming operations on other islands. 

In 2012, the companies operating in Kaua‘i “were reportedly spraying or applying 18 tons of restricted use pesticides in a relatively small footprint,” says Evslin. “It became a huge issue with activists on Kaua‘i.” 

Evslin says the seed companies explained they had to use large amounts of pesticide because insects in the tropics were worse than on the mainland.  

“So, if you compare our usage of chlorpyrifos, which is a very toxic insecticide, with the usage on the mainland, we ended up using about three times” mainland amounts, he says. 

Shortly after Evslin had shifted his focus to chronic, low-level pesticide exposure, members of the Kaua‘i County Council introduced legislation to limit the use of chemicals in the fertile fields of the island’s west side. 

“I wrote testimony for the hearing,” Evslin says. “At that point in my career, I was in my practice on Kaua‘i, which had a lot to do with wellness, so it was in my alley.” 

About 15 other physicians and medical practitioners on the island signed the testimony he read to the hearing, which was packed with hundreds of people representing both sides.  

Not comfortable in front of big crowds, much less emotionally charged ones like this, Evslin remained clinical, explaining that from a scientific perspective, it was important to think about the health risks from long-term, low-level exposure to the chemicals that were being sprayed in the community’s fields. 

“All they were asking for was that they wanted no-spray zones around schools, they wanted stronger right-to-know language so that people would be informed about what was being sprayed where,” Evslin recalls.  

Long story short: The council approved restrictions, the seed companies won a legal appeal that said only the state could impose such limits, and the state Legislature later followed up with its own law imposing a phased-in ban on chlorpyrifos on state agricultural lands. 

Other states followed suit. Federal government attempts to bar the use of the pesticide followed a similar on-again, off-again pattern as the issue – and control of the EPA –bounced between shifting political camps and agendas. 

Today, long after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated the EPA’s effective ban on chlorpyrifos, use of the pesticide still faces restrictions but is not banned at the federal level.  

New Evidence of Harm Emerges 

Coincidentally, a study published this month in the journal JAMA Neurology links prenatal exposure to the insecticide with enduring widespread molecular, cellular and metabolic effects in the brain.  

Researchers for the study, from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, and the Keck School of Medicine at USC, also linked the chemical exposure to poorer fine-motor control among youth. 

“A study like this is a powerful argument for the ban that Hawai‘i enacted in 2018,” says Evslin, who had served on a state-county joint fact-finding task force on this issue, and it provides evidence about “the danger of the federal government saying that even a blockbuster study like this could not even be analyzed [under the pending legislation] until the next formal review of the chemical,” a process that occurs about once every 15 years. 

That’s why he says Section 453 in the appropriations bill is so potentially dangerous.  

“What they’re saying is that if new data comes along, they can’t spend money reviewing it to see if they should modify” existing rules, Evslin says. “So theoretically what that would mean is only every 15 years could you do research and point out issues and make a difference about the danger of one of these chemicals.” 

Section 453 as Political Strategy 

Environmental and other non-governmental organizations advocating for restrictions on certain pesticide uses have ramped up efforts to block section 453, which opponents say plays into the strategy of chemical companies. 

After losing heavily in recent court cases, companies like Bayer/Monsanto have sought relief from state legislatures and courts, with limited success, according to Jay Feldman, executive director of one such group, Beyond Pesticides. Next, they turned to Congress. 

“They do it in a very circuitous route,” he said. “They do it through an appropriations bill, where they basically say to EPA, ‘you can’t change the label [on pesticides] unless you do an extensive health assessment,” which can take over a decade. “So, they’re not directly saying you can’t sue manufacturers, they’re saying the EPA cannot allow a change in a label without these tremendous hurdles that are very time-consuming. 

“The manufacturer then goes to the court, and says ‘Judge, we couldn’t change this label [to provide better warnings to consumers], because this is the label EPA gave us and Congress has precluded the change in label, so we can’t be held responsible for failure to warn.” 

The sort of Catch-22 routine blocks the last avenue for litigants seeking relief for damages, he said. The irony, Feldman adds, is that the pesticide companies are the ones who helped write the language in the bills. “Whether that would even hold up in court, it remains to be seen, but it’s been done before,” he said. 

In a statement, Bayer responded: “We agree that no company should have blanket immunity and, to be clear, the language in section 453 of the appropriations bill for the Department of the Interior would not prevent anyone from suing pesticide manufacturers. Anything to assert otherwise is a distortion of reality.

“As part of our multi-pronged approach, we support federal legislation alongside more than 360 agricultural organizations because the future of American farming depends on reliable science-based regulation of important crop protection products – determined safe for use by the EPA. Other measures include the support of legislation at the state level and a Supreme Court petition.

 “Legislation at a federal level is needed to ensure that states and courts do not take a position or action regarding product labels at odds with congressional intent, federal law and established scientific research and federal authority….”

In court filings, Bayer unit Monsanto has argued that because the EPA has approved glyphosate-based product labels without cancer warnings, plaintiffs cannot sue under state laws for failure to include such warnings.

Even so, with the application of Roundup on farm fields around the country, lawsuits alleging health damage from exposure to the chemical also began piling up. After initially winning some of the lawsuits by claiming research showed the chemical was safe, Bayer started losing, big-time, and the losses and legal costs piled up.

As of August 2025, Bayer had settled about 100,000 Roundup lawsuits for about $11 billion, but another 61,000 cases remain active.

In a statement on glyphosate, Bayer said it “stands behind the safety of our glyphosate-based products which have been tested extensively, approved by regulators and used around the globe for 50 years. The EPA has an extremely rigorous review process which spans multiple years, considers thousands of studies and involves many independent risk assessment experts at the EPA.”

Political Twilight Zone 

After the Kaua‘i hearings, the fact-finding recommendations and the County Council vote to restrict pesticide use around schools, Evslin says, he was stung by the seed industry representatives’ comments that he was “fear-mongering” and “unscientific” – the antithesis of his self-image. 

“And that’s when I was struck by this kind of Twilight Zone. It was as if they weren’t looking at the same scientific information at all.” 

A representative of the Hawaii Crop Improvement Association, which represents the seed companies, did not respond to Evslin’s assertion but in a statement said it supports the House measure.

The section, it said, will “help ensure that our hard-working agricultural producers across the country can rely on consistent agricultural labeling based on well-established and thorough scientific protocols.” 

Peter Adler, a conflict resolution consultant and chair of the joint task force charged with finding common ground among the feuding sides, recalls the role played by Evslin. 

“He did a lot of careful rounding up of studies,” Adler says of the task force debates. “It wasn’t just an opinion jamboree. It was much more based on trying to understand what the data was [concerning] the use of some of these pesticides.” 

Adler says the task force sought to sort out which claims were real and which ones were exaggerated or imagined, what could be confirmed, and what couldn’t. 

Evslin “was really good about pulling in a lot of data and groups of studies,” he says. “It was bringing evidence to the table. We’re not in a court of law, but we’re trying to work out [a solution in] a highly charged political environment. He was very fact-centered.” 

Evslin’s concerns intensified when he later started digging into the scientific studies on glyphosate, the active pesticide ingredient in Roundup and many other herbicides. 

“It was so obvious that the scientific literature had so much data about how dangerous it was, and all you hear from these industry places was, ‘no, it’s safe, it’s one of the best studied ones in the country, no regulatory agency has banned it, and on and on,” Evslin says. 

“I began to babble about it to my wife, and she said, ‘stop talking about it and write a book’.” 

So, he did, published in July 2021: “Breakfast at Monsanto’s: Is Roundup in Our Food Making Us Fatter, Sicker, and Sadder?”  

While conducting research for his book, Evslin said, he came across what he said was convincing scientific evidence that glyphosate was pervasive in our food supply and was causing damaging health effects. 

Glyphosate-Based Herbicides Changed Seed Science 

If chlorpyrifos proved a moral victory for Hawai‘i advocates hoping to limit chemical exposure that can cause developmental delay in children, the presence of glyphosate in food posed a greater challenge.  

In plant and crop genetics, one of the most profound changes in agriculture has been to genetically alter seeds so they become resistant to toxic chemicals in glyphosates. That is the primary ingredient used in Roundup, which is produced by Monsanto and has become the world’s most heavily used herbicide in history.  

By using seeds that are resistant to glyphosate, farmers can spray their fields with the pesticide, killing everything but the intended crops, and saving millions of dollars on weed control.  

After that discovery, use of Roundup and related glyphosate-based pesticides spread like, well, weeds.  

“We in the United States use 30-40% of the glyphosate in the world, and we have much less restrictive guidelines” on it, Evslin says. So, everything from soybeans to corn to canola to wheat – many of the ingredients used in our highly processed foods – are often sprayed with glyphosate herbicides and leave traces in the resulting food products that we consume.  

Tests, meanwhile, have shown that 80-90% of Americans have glyphosate in their bodies, which dissipates over time but can also be replenished if a steady diet of food and water contain the chemical. And pesticide opponents say they do. 

After examining hundreds of scientific studies on glyphosate and glyphosate formulas, Evslin says it became clear to him that there was powerful evidence suggesting links to cancer and other detrimental health effects.  

Glyphosate’s Role as an Antibiotic 

Amid piles of studies, Evslin thinks he’s found the regulatory Achilles heel for glyphosate. 

“It’s definitely an antibiotic,” Evslin says, “And it affects the microbiome – the bacterial content of our intestines and our skin and our respiratory tract. The vital role that it’s playing is only beginning to be fully understood. 

“We have more bacteria cells in us than we have human cells. They are an unbelievably integral part of everything – how we think, how our immune system works, how we digest foods.” 

Studies, he says, are showing links to obesity, inflammation, DNA changes and liver disease, among other disorders. 

But regulatory agencies don’t consider chemicals’ effects on the microbiome, he says.  

“What I’ve been trying to do with that is say, yes, I understand,” he says. “But we do regulate antibiotics in food and it’s an antibiotic, and we need to accept that fact. It seems to me it’s an Achilles heel, because it is an antibiotic, we regulate antibiotics, and that should be a short way to get it out of our food.” 

Prospects for Section 453 

What are the chances that Section 453 of the appropriations bill will be approved? 

Rather likely, it turns out. Few Republicans have gone against the party line in any recent votes. 

Hawai‘i congress member Tokuda stood firm in a statement ahead of the vote: “Hiding dangerous information on pesticides endangers everyone but especially workers, pregnant women, keiki, and vulnerable communities. It is another win for corporate interests and their priorities and yet another reckless, shameful, and immoral effort by Republicans. No corporation should be above the law, especially when lives are at risk.” 

The state’s other representative, Ed Case, also opposed the bill. In a letter to Evslin, he wrote that section 453 and other parts of the bill “prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing environmental and public health regulations related to clean water, clean air and hazardous waste and pesticide laws.”  

He said he also opposed a 23% cut to the EPA’s budget, “which severely impacts its capabilities to protect human health and the environment.” 

Says Evslin: “In terms of what will happen with the bill, my guess is that the House will pass it, and there may be more of a fight in the Senate if it crosses over. The provision is so buried, though, that I don’t think it will get defeated unless there is a dramatic increase in public awareness.” 

Either way, after the vote, Evslin will glance out at the tropical land where he once considered gardening, and then he’ll turn his attention back to the latest medical studies examining health effects from long-term exposure to pesticides.   

But the state is planning and building a new network of opportunities and support intended to reinvigorate Hawai‘i’s agricultural sector.

“It was generally thought that when sugar and pineapple plantations shut down, former plantation crop land would be cultivated with numerous smaller crops,” wrote UH economists Sumner La Croix and James Mak in 2021. “Instead, much of it lies fallow.”

So true, but after decades of decline and stagnation, conditions may be ripe for a rebound in diversified agriculture.

The department’s back

The state Department of Agriculture was renamed the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity on June 27, marking a new era for the agency, with new responsibilities and increased collaboration with other state agencies. Director Sharon Hurd says the legislation that passed this year prioritized biosecurity and the deterrence of agricultural crimes, like theft of crops, livestock and equipment, and increased access to capital for agricultural entrepreneurs.

The department’s kuleana is massive. “All those readers at the supermarket, we check those. We check gas [pump] meters. We check taxicabs. We check scales at the farmers markets. Any measuring device is under our purview, in addition to biosecurity, land and water for agriculture, loans, marketing.”

Last year, Gov. Josh Green signed Act 231 to create 44 positions for entomologists, plant quarantine inspectors, environmental health specialists and others. It was one of the most significant expansions of the department in 30 years.

The increase was driven by increased public awareness of invasive species statewide. “Biosecurity was less important when it was only impacting agriculture,” explains state Rep. Kirstin Kahaloa, former chair of the House Agriculture & Food Systems Committee. “As soon as it started impacting families in their yards, when it impacted schoolkids on their playgrounds, and now the beautiful landscape of our coconut trees across our street, now it has elevated to the level that we’ve needed for many decades.”

Ironically, these positions existed over a decade ago, but the 2009 Legislature reduced the Department of Agriculture’s budget by 19% and devastated institutional memory and expertise. As a result of the reduction in force order, 96 of the department’s 214 general-funded positions were eliminated.

Following the 2009 layoffs, the Hawaii Invasive Species Council, Ulupono Initiative, UH’s Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle Response team and Ant Lab, and other organizations, struggled to fill the void.

But the crippling of the department’s biosecurity functions continues to reverberate. “We’re still coming back from that,” laments Hurd. “These 44 positions that the Legislature was so kind to give us last year just bring us back to where we were in 2009. Now we have a chance to build from there.”

Among the species the department needs to target are the coconut rhinoceros beetle, coqui frog, little fire ant, rose-ringed parakeet and two-lined spittlebug.

But, Hurd declares: “The department’s back. We’re back to where we were.”

A two-legged stool

“There is an old saying that beginnings are delicate times, and with the pace of our modern world, that statement is even more valid,” wrote Bart Jones in 1994, when he was a member of the Honoka‘a Farmers Cooperative of East Hawai‘i Island. That was when the Hāmākua Sugar Plantation went bankrupt and closed, part of the overall decline of sugarcane in Hawai‘i.

Jones knew establishing a new agricultural regime would prove harrowing. “It is very easy to kill a seed, and it is easy to destroy a seedling, and it is very difficult to establish and maintain all the elements that are necessary to develop a new crop,” he wrote at the time.

1994 was also the year the state Legislature declared: “Within the next decade, 75,000 acres of agricultural lands and 50 million gallons per day of irrigation water are expected to be released by plantations. The downsizing of the sugar and pineapple industries will idle a valuable inventory of supporting infrastructure including irrigation systems, roads, drainage systems, processing facilities, workshops and warehouses.”

Transferring fallow agricultural lands and their infrastructure to new uses was the primary mission of the Agribusiness Development Corp., which was established that year.

However, multiple reports have criticized the ADC, including research reports issued by the Legislative Reference Bureau in 1997 and 2007 and a scathing performance audit in February 2021. “More than 25 years after its creation, we found an agency that is generally unaware of its unique powers and exemptions, and has done little – if anything – toward achieving its statutory purpose,” the state auditor reported in 2021.

When longtime ADC Executive Director James Nakatani died in April 2023, the beleaguered agency was at a critical juncture. Four months later, Wendy Gady got the job.

Gady exudes a dogged, collaborative and transparent attitude. Since September 2023, she has publicly released weekly reports, which function as briefings on the ADC’s work. (Find them at dbedt.hawaii.gov/adc/reports.)

Furthermore, the ADC has made efforts to address historic sources of criticism. In November 2024, the state auditor’s office found the ADC had fully implemented 30 of the 36 recommendations in its 2021 audit. The other six were no longer applicable.

Gady says the agency’s agenda is to find partners who align with its mission of building a new statewide food system: “We’re looking for radical collaborators. We’re looking for talent. We’re looking for farmers. We’re looking for food entrepreneurs.”

To much of the general public, the Agribusiness Development Corp. – part of DBEDT – appears at first glance to duplicate the role of the Department of Agriculture, but Gady explains the difference. “They are regulatory, so they handle everything from plant quarantine to invasive species.”

The Department of Agriculture also works with small, beginner farmers. Its “agricultural parks are designed for people that are just starting out.”

Once a farmer is more firmly established, the next step is the ADC, Gady says. “When you’re ready to graduate, you’re graduating to ADC. And that creates new room in the agricultural park for a new entrepreneur to come in and hopefully get birthed into the ADC.”

To use a business term, much of ADC’s mission today is to bring fledgling agricultural businesses to scale. Providing long-term licenses to operate on ADC lands – up to 35 years – provides stability for farmers who may be working on month-to-month leases under private landlords.

And stability for farmers means stable food systems for consumers and a foundation for Hawai‘i’s food security. “We have to make things work here. We can’t count on the white horse to come in on a ship,” Gady says.

Much of ADC’s current focus is the maintenance of irrigation infrastructure on Kaua‘i and O‘ahu – infrastructure that creates the capacity for irrigated agriculture. The Kekaha ditch system supplies the East Kaua‘i Irrigation System and the Waiāhole water system on O‘ahu feeds the Wahiawa Irrigation System.

“The future of agriculture consists of infrastructure facilities around application and irrigation,” explains Dane Wicker, deputy director of the Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism, which includes the ADC.

“All of those are high-cost [investments] that no farmer alone – or collectively – can support financially. If the state is going to be serious about food security and resiliency, then the state needs to make investments in land acquisition,” and then plan, design and build those key facilities, Wicker says. “That’s the future of agriculture.”

The vast majority of ADC’s portfolio is focused on O‘ahu and Kaua‘i. Kaua‘i alone accounts for about 80% of the ADC’s inventory of land, though there is interest in expanding capacity on Hawai‘i Island and Maui. It’s a matter of time, money and available parcels suitable for cultivation, acknowledged Wicker and Gady.

The state’s budget for the fiscal year 2026 sets aside $39 million to buy 1,000 more acres on Kaua‘i. There are also plans to spend $17 million to build a small animal processing and storage facility on O‘ahu, which would lead to more Hawai‘i-raised meats for consumers.

Two relatively new facilities help turn ag produce into sauces, snacks, jams, cookies and more: The Wahiawā Value-Added Product Development Center, opened in April 2024 on O‘ahu, and the Maui Food Innovation Center, opened in November 2022 in Kahului.

The Local Food Coalition, an alliance that includes the Land Use Research Foundation of Hawaii, UH’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience, the Ulupono Initiative, Hawai‘i Farmers Union United and the Hawaii Food Industry Association, emerged as a key proponent for this network. “Value-added manufacturing plays an indispensable role in bolstering both our agricultural sector and the broader economy,” testified the coalition to the Legislature on April 1. “Establishing a network of open-access food and value-added product development facilities is not merely an aspiration but a necessity in our quest for agricultural and economic sustainability.”

Among the coalition’s goals is to add incubators on other islands, like those in Wahiawā and Kahului.

“These spaces are where small businesses can safely and affordably produce value-added products, like jams, jellies, sauces, pickles, dry goods – anything coming from local agriculture and something that can now have shelf life,” says Kahaloa, who represents the Kona district of Hawai‘i Island. “There’s been a lack of access to certified kitchens. It’s very expensive for agriculture to be able to create their own facility for one value-added commodity. What this does is really break barriers, especially in our rural communities and former plantation communities across Hawai‘i.”

The state is trying to increase demand and generate a market for local ag products, beginning with vendors across government departments. A 2019 law committed Hawai‘i to doubling food production by 2030. In 2021, a farm-to-school program was established within the Department of Education; it mandated that 30% of all food served in public schools consist of “locally sourced products” by 2030. Another law set goals for every “principal department” in state government to procure a certain level of locally sourced products when it contracts for services.

The future of local agriculture appears heavily contingent on sustained government investment. As Gady explains, “ADC was created to step in as sugar and pineapple stepped out. We were a three-legged economic stool [in the past]: We had ag with sugar and pineapple, we had tourism, we had the military. When you take sugar and pineapple out, your stool is really unbalanced. You only have two legs.”

Restoring the stool’s third leg would still require agricultural interests to navigate competing demands for agricultural lands, including solar projects.

Most Ag Lands Are Pastures

The Hawai‘i State Data Book estimates that 1.93 million acres of land is zoned for agricultural purposes. That’s a lot – almost half of the land in Hawai‘i. The landmass of all the Hawaiian Islands together, except for Hawai‘i Island, totals only 1.54 million acres.

The 2020 Update to the Hawai‘i Statewide Agricultural Land Use Baseline found that only 886,211 acres of land – less than half of all agriculturally zoned lands – presently are used for agriculture.

Most of that land is set aside for pastures. Only 120,632 acres – less than 7% of all agriculturally zoned lands in Hawai‘i – were under crop cultivation, according to the land use update. With so much agricultural land unsuitable for cultivation due to soil quality, lack of water, isolation and unsuitable terrain, there is a natural question: How do we effectively use all of Hawai‘i’s agricultural lands?

While agencies like the Agribusiness Development Corp. are working to bring more agricultural land into cultivation, solar energy facilities have been permitted on agricultural lands that meet certain classifications.

That pits agricultural projects against solar projects and clean energy goals. House Bill 778, passed this year by the Legislature and signed into law by the governor, calls for an integrated land use study to inventory all of the grand goals set by the Legislature through the years.

The new law states that “multiple climate and sustainability statutory targets have been enacted in the State, including developing at least 22,500 affordable rental housing units, doubling food production, increasing food exports, requiring the Department of Education and University of Hawai‘i to become net-zero in energy use, requiring that all of the electricity generated in Hawai‘i comes from renewable sources, sequestering more atmospheric carbon and greenhouse gases, requiring all state and county facilities to use reclaimed water, and requiring the mandatory upgrade of all cesspools.”

It is a daunting list of targets. For the next two years, the law requires the state’s sustainability coordinator, Danielle Bass, to facilitate conversations and collect “data-based estimates on the amount of land required” to meet the needs of these competing uses within agricultural districts. To do so, the Office of Planning and Sustainable Development must compile and analyze existing data while working with farming groups, counties, community members and state government entities.

The goal is to “clearly define and prioritize the protection of productive agricultural lands to prevent further encroachment from nonagricultural developments, including developing measures to ensure agricultural lands designated for agriculture production are not compromised for short-term development needs.”

Balancing the state’s multiplying mandates is a crucial overdue conversation for state planners. “We have our urban growth boundaries. We have our general plans. We have our sustainable community plans,” explains Bass. “But what are we doing? We’re still being reactive instead of being proactive in terms of land use.”

The Office of Planning and Sustainable Development’s study could set the trajectory of any agricultural resurgence, says Wicker, the DBEDT deputy director. “Until we know what lands are critical for food production, we cannot piecemeal and say ‘OK, solar farm you go there,’ or ‘Biofuel, you go there,’ because [these uses] may not be able to coexist with the land we’ve identified for crop production.”

Coordinating competing uses is the goal, Bass says. “When I see these three big buckets of housing, energy, agriculture, it’s less about the competing uses of the same land.” Instead, coordination among stakeholders is key. There could be enough land to balance these competing needs and even rezone certain agricultural lands for conservation, but such work would have to be coordinated.

The Challenges Ahead

Perry Philipp, a UH College of Tropical Agriculture professor, wrote in 1953: “It is evident that many of Hawaii’s diversified agricultural industries show promise for expansion and that such expansion would materially strengthen Hawaii’s economy. To bring it about [Hawai‘i needs people with] vision, enterprise, venture capital and capacity for hard work.”

As Governor Green signed several pieces of agricultural legislation into law on June 27, Philipp’s attitude returned to my mind.

“Farming and ranching are a tough business,” Brian Miyamoto, executive director of the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau, said at the event. “Land use, water, labor, energy, supply chain disruptions, natural disasters: These are issues that our farmers deal with every single day.”

True in 1953, true today and true, undoubtedly, into the future.

Beginnings: Derek Petrowski sets a goal every New Year’s Eve and did so again on Dec. 31, 2021. “I try to make it a realistic goal,” Petrowski says, “but this time I was feeling a little wild. So I said, ‘2022 is coming up, I’m going to get a job at a telescope.’”

Petrowski is the son of an engineer, whose career took him around the world. Derek was born in Suva, Fiji, but his family settled in Hawai‘i in 1990. He left school after 10th grade when “I found myself getting bored in school,” Petrowski says. So he got into the world of carpentry and later worked as a car audio specialist on O‘ahu.

He says curiosity has driven him throughout his life, which at times meant teaching himself how to build motorcycle engines and learning how power plants worked while helping build them.

Overcoming Doubts: Petrowski was working at the Honua Ola power plant in Pepe‘ekeo on Hawai‘i Island while his wife, Carolyn, was employed at the Canada France Hawaii Telescope in accounting and administration. At a holiday party in 2021, Derek talked with some of Carolyn’s colleagues and discovered how similar their jobs were to his.

“I always had an interest in working with the telescopes, but I thought … I don’t have the pedigree to even try for this.” Despite his doubts, he applied for a position at the Keck Observatory on Jan. 3, 2022.

Photo courtesy: Derek Petrowski

“I remember my first interview, I was so nauseous because I really wanted it. I was in cold sweats and I felt like I was going to throw up. I had never felt like that before.”

Keck Community Engagement Manager Kekoa Alip says he saw great potential in Petrowski “and it’s proven to be right.” Alip says Petrowski is passionate about involving people who are already part of Hawai‘i’s community in telescope operations.

“We don’t have a lot of local people working in the telescopes,” says Alip. “My target was to get talent from the community.” That’s why telescope experience was not a job requirement.

Typical Days: “This is the first job where I wake up in the morning and I don’t dread going to work,” Petrowski says. “And when I come home, I feel like I accomplished something. I’ve been there for three years now and that feeling hasn’t changed.”

“Support techs,” Petrowski says, “we’re like the pit crew for a race team.”

On a typical day, he comes into the observatory on Maunakea in the morning and makes sure all the telescope’s instruments are chilled and working correctly. He checks software, cameras, infrastructure or anything else that could keep the telescope from functioning, then works with others to resolve any issues.

Along with his everyday work, Petrowski helps on public tours and passes on his knowledge to new hires.

“Impressive and inspiring is his passion for community involvement and serving the community,” says Alip, “which is one of our core values at Keck – to be great stewards, and he’s proven to be one of the greatest.”

Nick Bradley, born and raised on O‘ahu, developed a passion for astronomy at a young age and eventually turned the hobby into his profession.

His stargazing events are “about exposing more people to the wonders of the universe – getting them to look up, be curious, ask questions, find the answers and share what they learn. And honestly, it’s just a fun experience for literally anyone.”

Inspiration

In middle school, he discovered a book about constellations. He began connecting the dots in the night sky, using binoculars to explore. His curiosity grew when he visited the Bishop Museum and experienced its planetarium show. There he also learned about the local astronomy club, which introduced him to serious stargazing.

“Growing up, I was always just curious how things worked. I used to take things apart, even if they were still working, to try and figure out how they worked and learn something from it,” he says. “I used giant telescopes to look at amazing things. And now I’m left asking, ‘How do the stars work? How does the galaxy work? How does the universe work?’ I gotta know!”

Turning Point

In January 2019, Bradley turned his love of the stars into a business.

Bradley faced a slow-down in the pandemic, but it gave him time to be more thoughtful about his business, refine his marketing strategy, build his reputation in the community and plan for the future. After the pandemic, the business took off, he says.

Stargazers of Hawaii today offers both public and private shows for locals and visitors, including events at Turtle Bay Resort, Prince Waikiki, Royal Hawaiian Center and Salt Kaka‘ako. Using 7-foot telescopes and stargazing apps, the shows engage audiences with hands-on explorations and visual aids that make stargazing and astronomical concepts accessible.

Parents Become Kids

Stargazers of Hawaii also does birthday parties, weddings and school visits – “anything outside that you can think of works great!” he says.

“Those community events are really fun,” he says. “…. It’s amazing to see schools and parents getting involved. Many of the parents have never looked through a telescope before so it’s a whole new experience for them as well. They become the kids.”

Hawaiian Culture

Bradley says stargazing is a way to honor the ancestral knowledge that Hawaiians have used for centuries to navigate the Pacific Ocean. The ancient practice of wayfinding – in which navigators use the stars, ocean swells, wind patterns and more to chart their course – is always discussed during his events.

“We talk about wayfinding – the traditional way and the modern way – as well as incorporate Hawaiian stories, along with the stars.”

Astronomy Community: The blend of tradition and exploration helps make the astronomy community in Hawai‘i so special,” Bradley says.

“We have the museum, which presents and shares research; the navigators, who study the stars; and the Institute for Astronomy, with all the giant telescopes on Haleakalā and Maunakea. There’s so much spark and curiosity. … It’s kind of a mecca for stargazing.”

The global accelerator Hatch uses its Kona branch as part of its mission to reduce the footprint of farmed and alternative seafood.

Co-founder and partner Wayne Murphy calls Hatch the world’s first aquaculture accelerator. “There’s an amazing array of aquaculture technologies that we have invested in. We’ve sent out a global call for applications pretty much every year since we started” in 2017, he says.

Hatch has three locations: in Norway and Singapore and at Kailua-Kona’s Hawaii Ocean Science and Technology Park, also known as the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority.

The 2019 cohort was in-person and its 14 startups began their accelerator training and development in Kona before moving on to Norway and ending in Singapore. Due to the Covid pandemic, the 2020 cohort was completely virtual and included eight startups.

Crystal Johnson, who is in charge of business development for Hatch, is from Ha‘ikū, Maui, and was mentored by her father in the seafood industry. She says he gave her an in-depth knowledge of seafood development and procurement.

The Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority in Kailua-Kona. | Photo: courtesy of Hatch Blue

The Natural Energy Laboratory is an excellent location for Hatch, she says.

“NELHA in Kona is one of the world’s premier aquaculture parks. Almost nowhere else in the world has what this park has,” Johnson says.

Water is pumped into the park from the bottom of the deepest underwater sea cliffs in the world. The water’s temperature allows for cold water species to thrive and if surface water is added, warm water species can be grown too.

“You can grow a variety of species in warm or cold water where in most aquaculture parks you don’t have a choice,” she says. “It provides a huge range.”

No startups from the Hatch portfolio are based in Hawai‘i, but one team from the 2020 cohort spent about a year in Hawai‘i. Sea Warden, co-founded by Zack Dinh and Shelby Oliver, provides monitoring solutions that allow seafood companies to share and trade data.

Related stories: Hawaiʻi is the World’s Shrimp Breeding Capital, Entrepreneurs Inspired by the Ocean, Aquaculture Ahi: The Holy Grail of Fish Farming

“Hatch has been such a wonderful boost for us and a treasure trove of knowledge and networks,” says Dinh, who credits the accelerator for putting his company on the map and helping it to “quickly pivot toward pond aquaculture.”

Sea Warden “produces data that is useful for farmers. We can warn them about potential hazards like disease outbreaks and provide advice,” he says.

Hatch says it has invested up to $150,000 in each of over 30 companies around the world. At the beginning of the year, Hatch received enough funding to continue its accelerator program for another four years.

“It gives me and the Hatch team an opportunity to invest in further resources in Hawai‘i,” co-founder Murphy says, and to do “what I hope will be a very successful job of attracting international talent and investment to Hawai‘i and to NELHA from an aquaculture perspective.”

From street level, Waikīkī feels like a dense urban environment packed with invincible structures. But viewed from the air, its vulnerabilities are clear: All that heft is situated on what looks like a low-lying island, buffered on one side by a thin ribbon of sand and on the other by the murky Ala Wai Canal.

The area is remarkably vulnerable to water, like much of Honolulu’s flat urban corridor. Water pours down streams in the Ala Wai watershed during heavy rain, often slipping over the banks of the canal.

When rainfall coincides with king tides – an exceptionally high tide seen in winter and summer – streets can flood from Mō‘ili‘ili to Māpunapuna as seawater inundates the porous ground, lifting the water table to create new wetlands and simultaneously blocking the drainage system.

Then there’s permanent sea level rise. For years, climate scientists have warned that the ocean would swallow more and more coastline as glaciers melt and water expands in a warming climate. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a 3- or 4-foot rise by 2100 if global warming stays under 2 degrees Celsius, and a more than 6-foot rise if warming exceeds that mark.

“We know that change is coming to our shoreline, whether we’re prepared or not.”

– Matthew Gonser, Chief Resilience Officer & Executive Director of Honolulu’s Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resilience

Chip Fletcher, the associate dean for academic affairs at UH Mānoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology and a leading climate scientist, says worst-case scenarios are highly plausible.

What’s more, he says Hawai‘i and other Central Pacific islands can expect additional rise because of “fingerprinting,” a phenomenon that originates with the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica and other glaciers. The ice exerts a slight gravitational pull on the water surrounding it. As the ice melts and that pull subsides, distant locations can experience sea level rise that is more than the global average.

“This is not your average thorny problem,” says Fletcher. “Sea level rise is an unsolvable problem that needs to be managed so we can decrease the amount of loss and suffering and damage that we experience.”

On O‘ahu, rising oceans have washed out roads and beachfront homes have collapsed from coastal erosion – costly, painful problems, but isolated. The future will bring much worse.

The Hawai‘i Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Commission’s report from 2017 estimates that, statewide, 3.2 feet of sea level rise would displace more than 20,000 people and destroy over $19 billion worth of land and structures, not counting a lot of critical infrastructure.

These human and financial impacts would hit the urban core heaviest, including the epicenter of the state’s tourism sector, Waikīkī. On NOAA’s sea level rise viewer, a 3-foot rise would flood areas near the Ala Wai Canal. At just 4 feet of sea level rise, more than half of Waikīkī would be underwater. At 6 feet, it’s all submerged, along with much of the southern coast.

Waikīkī’s Vanishing Beaches

Like many residents, I hadn’t visited the shoreline between Kaimana Beach and Magic Island in years. It was time to get off Google maps and go see for myself.

The beaches were in worse shape than I expected. Tourists may envision strolling along Waikīkī’s fabled sands, but it’s one of the least walkable stretches on the island – narrow, clogged with people and structures, or literally gone.

Heading west from the Kapahulu groin, a sprawl of sunbathers and gear tossed across the loose, crunchy sand drives me inland to the sidewalk. I finally turn left into the Royal Hawaiian Center that leads to The Royal Hawaiian hotel.

The beachfront is blocked by a fence. Back inside, I soak up the hotel’s calm, stately interiors before heading west to the Sheraton Waikiki. The beach fronting the Sheraton has largely disappeared, and the elevated walkway is shut for safety reasons. I move through the patio area, past an infinity pool lined with sunbathers, then down past a patch of sand and people huddled under a lone tree. Circling the edge of a tiny pocket beach, I finally reach an uncrowded stretch: the seawall straddling the Halekulani Hotel, closed for renovations, and the deep Pacific pressing against it.

Beyond the seawall, waves make the path unpassable. It’s about 2:30 in the afternoon in late July and low tide is at 3:41, so most times of the day would be worse than this.

Nuisance Flooding Could Turn into Permanent Inundation

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a 3- or 4-foot rise by 2100 if global warming stays under 2 degrees Celsius, and a more than 6-foot rise if warming exceeds that mark. The IPCC report released in August 2021 says the world will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2040 or sooner, and it’s irreversible. Under most scenarios, warming will continue through the century, though dramatic cuts to global emissions could stabilize temperatures.

Here’s what that could look like in Waikīkī and the surrounding area:

Map based on the NOAA Sea Level Rise Viewer, updated July 2020,  The viewer shows the scale of potential flooding, but not exact locations. It does not account for future erosion, construction or mitigation efforts. The SLR scenarios are mapped to average high tides and factor in hydrologic connectivity, or how surface and subsurface water connects. | Animation: Amy Ngo

■  Waikīkī at 2 feet of sea level rise  – The first impacts will be flooding, depicted in light orange, at the Ala Wai Golf Course. The deep navy blue is the ocean and the Ala Wai Canal, as well as the convergence of the Mānoa and Pālolo streams flowing into the canal.
■  Waikīkī at 3 feet of sea level rise  – Canal spillage and groundwater inundation become more pervasive. Rising seas enter the permeable rock and push up the water table, creating wetlands and blocking drainage systems.
■  Waikīkī at 4 feet of sea level rise  – Much of Waikīkī, as well as low-lying residential and commercial areas, are regularly submerged. The flood zone grows further at 5 feet of SLR.
■  Waikīkī at 6 feet of sea level rise  – Coastal flooding and groundwater inundation are catastrophic and require dramatic adaptations and even retreat. NOAA says it has a high degree of confidence about the extent of flooding at 6 feet, but less confidence at lower levels of sea level rise.

An Engineered Shoreline

No one with a financial stake in Waikīkī – and that’s nearly everyone in Hawai‘i – is ready to give up the beachfront, a proverbial golden goose. If the beaches were completely eroded, Waikīkī would lose an estimated $2.2 billion annually from tourists going elsewhere, according to a UH Sea Grant College Program analysis published in 2018.

In the decades between the first seawall being erected in 1890 near Kapi‘olani Park and the construction of the Ala Wai Canal in the 1920s, which drained the area’s wetlands and duck ponds, dozens of projects were completed – groins, more seawalls, coral dredging and sand fills. The shore became a fortified, engineered construction.

Since 1949, about 25% of O‘ahu’s beaches have narrowed or been lost to artificial hardening, and at least 60% are now in a state of chronic erosion, according to the O‘ahu Resilience Strategy, a set of action items released by the city in 2019. Yet coastal experts agree that beaches are more effective at keeping water at bay than hardening tactics, and far less prone to failure.

“Beaches are not just for recreational purposes and for tourists. They’re also important as a buffer between the properties and the ocean,” says Rick Egged, president of the Waikīkī Beach Special Improvement District Association. Among other projects, the nonprofit association collects fees from commercial properties to help pay for the area’s shoreline projects.

“The bottom line is that to protect a lot of these urban areas, you’ve got to armor them in some way. And the first step is to build a beach because that’s better than just a wall,” says Egged.

The process of coaxing sand to accumulate continues in earnest. In May, the final leg of a major beach project was completed, with 20,000 cubic yards of marine sand spread in front of the Moana Surfrider and Royal Hawaiian resorts. In June, the state Department of Land and Natural Resources released a draft environmental impact assessment for a fresh batch of projects, including a proposal to build a beach to front the Sheraton Waikiki and Halekulani resorts.

Unlike most projects that focus on maintenance, this is “a big, visionary, ambitious plan for (a group of ) T-head groins and beach fill – we’re building a beach where there never was one, as historically the beaches were very small in that area,” says Dolan Eversole, an extension agent with the UH Sea Grant College Program who works with the Waikīkī association. Eversole sees his role as translating the science of climate change into practical suggestions.

He says stakeholders he works with have started listening in earnest. “Among local government, state government and private developers, there was a very noticeable shift in perception and acceptance of the science, starting about five years ago,” says Eversole. Before that, “people were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re going to wait and see.’ ”

Eversole has been collaborating with Chip Fletcher, Wendy Meguro of the UH School of Architecture and others to host what they term design charettes, small-group discussions geared at getting people to think about adaptation strategies. In June, I joined a group of civil engineers as they tossed around ideas that ranged from the straightforward, such as moving critical infrastructure and flood-proofing lower levels, to more dramatic steps such as elevating streets and moving commercial activity off the ground floor.

Others went big and suggested digging out Waikīkī’s streets and replacing them with canals – a Venice on the Pacific. Advocates say it’s the kind of radical idea that might actually help the area cope with chronic or permanent flooding.

Creating a Beach in Waikīkī Where None Exists

A draft environmental assessment for the state Department of Land and Natural Resources envisions installing T-groins to create a beach in front of the Sheraton Waikiki and Halekulani hotels. Currently, seawalls are the main barrier between the water and the properties.

Source: “Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, Waikīkī Beach Improvement and Maintenance Program”; prepared for the Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural Resources and partnered with the Waikīkī Special Improvement District Association; released June 2021. | Illustration: Amy Ngo.            ■ Seawall and Walkway   ■ Existing Groins will be rebuilt   ■ New Groins

Living Shorelines, Adaptations and Retreat, at 6 feet of Sea Level Rise

With 6 feet of rise, the city will need visionary ideas to cope. UH Mānoa professor Judith Stilgenbauer’s map of Honolulu shows ferries linking the southern coast, with “living shorelines” such as wetlands and tidal marshes serving as a buffer between the ocean and the built environment.

Areas needing adaptations or strategic retreat are marked in blue and yellow. Adaptations could be building up the land, elevating structures or designing buildings to withstand flooding.

Source: “South Shore Promenade and Coastal Open Space Network Study: Resilience and Connectivity”; Hawai‘i Office of Planning and UH Community Design Center; Professor Judith Stilgenbauer, principal investigator; released November 2020. | Illustration: courtesy of University of Hawaiʻi Community Design Center

Living with Water

Some of the more intriguing ideas for dealing with rising oceans come from the UH Community Design Center on the Mānoa campus. Judith Stilgenbauer, a professor of landscape architecture and urban design, led a research and design team that looked at returning public lands to natural wetlands and opening up the largely industrial shoreline to recreation.

The result was a report called the “South Shore Promenade and Coastal Open Space Network Study,” released late last year with the help of state funding. The renderings reimagine some of Honolulu’s scrappier areas – such as Ke‘ehi Lagoon and a portion of the Kalihi Kai waterfront – as well as the Ala Wai Canal and the stretch from the ‘Aiea Bay Recreational Area to the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center.

Long-term, the plan envisions the entire southern shore linked by wetland buffers and coastal parks, all walkable and bikeable, with ferries and water taxis that stop along the shoreline and travel up the canal. This may seem fanciful, but if Honolulu sees the higher end of predictions for sea level rise, learning to live with lots of water will be a necessity.

“If we think strategically about moving things back from the shoreline or negotiating easements for the spaces we need to prevent sea level rise from affecting the built environment, why not then also create better connectivity along the shore and more recreational opportunities?” asks Stilgenbauer. “In many cases, we’re turning our backs on this beautiful waterfront.”

Among the three specific sites explored in the report, the one that gets the most attention is the Ala Wai Canal and the city golf course along its mauka edge. By creating wetlands spanned by wooden walkways, the plan tackles three water problems: rising oceans flooding the canal; rainwater flowing down the watershed; and groundwater inundation, which is already happening.

This kind of green infrastructure “allows the water in, absorbing it, but also increasing the distance between development and water, in many instances by creating physical barriers in the form of wide, landscaped berms,” explains Stilgenbauer.

She calls them soft, nature-based solutions that stand in contrast to hard, engineered solutions.

“An engineer is mainly concerned with keeping the water out,” says Stilgenbauer. “But urban designers or architects tend to be generalists, and we worry about things like beauty and ecological performance and social aspects. A big component of sea level rise has to do with social and environmental justice,” she says, as underserved communities can’t afford to move away or adapt.

Matthew Gonser, who is the chief resilience officer and executive director of Honolulu’s Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resilience, finds the designs inspiring.

“I think those visions really help us think about what’s possible. … The challenge now is that we haven’t had to consider this kind of integrated and coordinated infrastructure in a very long time – probably not since the city was first being built,” he says. “And in that case, a lot of it was either being done independently, whether it’s the state building the harbor or the airport, or private industry working on properties downtown all the way through Waikīkī.”

First Signs of Sea Level Rise

UH’s Fletcher warns that before ocean water begins encroaching on land, sea level rise in Hawai‘i will appear most often as “nuisance flooding.” Odd gurgles of water rising from storm drains on sunny days, standing water in grassy sections along the Ala Wai Canal, moderate rains that turn low-lying streets into ponds.

With a team of graduate students, he tracked rising oceans to rises in the water table, and first recognized the problem of groundwater inundation – a leading indicator of sea level rise.

“This is not your average thorny problem. Sea level rise is an unsolvable problem that needs to be managed.”

– Chip Fletcher, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, UH’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology

“Water tables rise and fall in synchrony with the tides in the oceans,” says Fletcher. “You can build all the seawalls in the world and keep the ocean out,” he says, “but the groundwater is still going to get you.”

During high tides, even without rain, the groundwater gets pushed up through storm drains, flooding streets. “It is already happening now,” he says, “but it’s going to seriously accelerate 10 years from now.”

Eversole from the UH Sea Grant College concurs.

“There are well-developed methods for controlling erosion and wave run-up along the coast. We’re going to try to build a beach and maintain a beach in Waikīkī, and we’ll keep doing that until we can’t afford to do it anymore. But with the groundwater table, there is no way to really prevent that from happening,” he says.

“If you think of the geology of Honolulu, it’s like a sponge, and you can put concrete over the sponge, but the water finds a way in.”

– Dolan Eversole, Extension Agent, UH Sea Grant College Program

Beyond the damage caused by flooding, the water is also filthy. Sewage leaking from corroded underground pipes and cesspools mixes with the brackish water.

Some shoreline areas such as Kaka‘ako Waterfront Park are built on landfill, which is just piles of accumulated rubbish, “so we don’t know what all is buried there and what could leach into the water table,” says Stilgenbauer.

Another landfill site, Māpunapuna, is built on old fishponds and is literally sinking. At times, heavy rains and king tides make the streets impassable.

Driving through water that hits the top of your tires could become common elsewhere too. A 2020 study from Shellie Habel, a coastal geologist and extension agent with the UH Sea Grant College, predicts that by the 2030s, even four-wheel-drive vehicles could run into trouble as groundwater inundation and storm drain backflow overwhelm city streets and trigger widespread drainage failures.

Architects and Planners are Reimagining the Southern Shoreline

Creating wetlands at the Ala Wai Canal at 3 feet of sea level rise – UH Mānoa professor Judith Stilgenbauer envisions turning the Ala Wai Golf Course into wetlands. The spot is already impacted by groundwater inundation and will be one of the first urban areas to experience chronic flooding with just 2 feet of SLR.

In the near term, nine holes of the current 18-hole course would remain intact and wetlands introduced to absorb water. An elevated boardwalk lets water flow underneath and pedestrians and bikers travel along the canal’s mauka bank. In the long term, the wetlands would naturalize and expand, taking over the golf course, absorbing more water and supporting more biodiversity. Ala Wai Boulevard would be elevated, and elevated landforms added along Date Street and the Ala Wai Community Park.

The cross-section shows the wetlands at 3 feet of sea level rise. | Source: “South Shore Promenade and Coastal Open Space Network Study: Resilience and Connectivity”; Hawai‘i Office of Planning and UH Community Design Center; Professor Judith Stilgenbauer, principal investigator; released November 2020. | Illustration: courtesy of University of Hawaiʻi Community Design Center; Amy Ngo

Small Steps Forward

Like climate change more generally, sea level rise is an immense problem with no easy answers – and no central decision-making authority to select, fund and implement the kind of wide scale adaptations needed to withstand huge influxes of water.

Jessica Podoski, a hydraulic engineer and climate change expert with the Honolulu district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, says the state has to decide which areas to protect, which ones can adapt to rising seas, and which should be abandoned altogether.

“There will always be stakeholders with opposing interests, and Hawai‘i’s leaders need to have a vision for what the future of our state will look like,” she writes in an email. “The hard decisions and investments must be made now in order to head off more difficult and costly choices in the future.”

Some of those battles played out in the Corps of Engineers’ plan for the Ala Wai watershed, which was designed to prevent the kind of devastating flooding a 100-year storm would inflict on the city. (The Corps’ focus is storm-driven flooding and not sea level rise specifically, notes Podoski.) The plan featured a huge pumping station, as well as floodwalls and detention basins extending into the upper reaches of Mānoa, Pālolo and Makiki valleys. Community opposition contributed to the plan’s escalating price tag, which reached $651 million.

Though the project was killed, Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi announced in July that the city had signed an agreement with the Corps of Engineers to revisit it.

Gonser from the city climate office says the Blangiardi administration understands the gravity of the situation facing Honolulu.

“We know that change is coming to our shoreline, whether we’re prepared or not. And we know that we will need to take action,” he says. “So the administration is super committed to engaging with the community and coordinating with the state, and trying to maximize our funding opportunities.”

Some funding ideas on the table are collecting stormwater fees, leveraging bonds and tapping federal funds, including “earmarks” in the federal budget. The infrastructure deal that passed through the U.S. Senate in August (but still faces a House vote as of this writing) includes at least $2.8 billion for the state to rebuild roads and bridges with climate change in mind, invest in clean energy, improve water and wastewater facilities, implement flood control projects and restore coastal habitats.

In July, Gov. David Ige signed into law two bills that specifically address sea level rise. One requires home sellers to disclose whether their properties are vulnerable to sea level rise. The other requires the Hawai‘i Office of Planning to identify state facilities that could be impacted by sea level rise and flooding. Some expect that city and state guidance to build for 3 feet of rise will become law soon and that shoreline setbacks are coming.

In the private sector, newer constructions such as the Whole Foods Market on Kamakee Street and the South Shore Market in Ward Village are slightly elevated, with entries above street level. Owners of the Princess Kaiulani hotel, tentatively slated to be torn down in 2022, plan to rebuild significantly above grade.

Architects and developers are going beyond the building code and considering sea level rise in both design and siting, says Nathan Saint Clare, a principal at the architecture firm AHL. For many large projects, they’re looking to build in areas away from the shore; Saint Clare’s team also employs features such as terraced walls and landscaping that can handle floodwaters.

Saint Clare sees Waikīkī’s hospitality sector as a creative source for new designs and adaptations. “We’ve got some great ones here – leading brands that have projects all over the world – and they’re going to bring some of their best ideas” to tackle the problem.

“A Lack of Anxiety”

Add them up, and there’s real momentum. But is it enough? Most people I spoke with don’t think so.

“What we run into is a lack of anxiety,” says Fletcher. “Developers, government officials, legislators, individuals all have different levels of anxiety about climate change. If you have high anxiety, you’re more motivated to implement potentially radical-looking policies or potentially expensive policies.” Most people fall in the medium range, he says.

There’s not nearly enough infrastructure work being done, says Matt Heahlke, a civil engineer and regional manager with Goodfellow Bros., which has worked on coastal projects around the Islands. “What really needs to happen is the community leaders and government need to realize that this is a priority and put emphasis on how we’re going to rebuild our infrastructure – to make it a daily conversation about how to be ready for sea level changes.”

Egged, the Waikīkī Beach Special Improvement District Association president, started a neighborhood advisory committee that includes lifeguards, beach boys and “everyone we could think of” to talk about problems and come up with solutions. Like others, he thinks this kind of community approach is the best way to build awareness and get buy-in.

“What are the issues we need to be worrying about right now? And what do we need to be planning to do in the 5- to 10-year level? And then the 10- to 20-year level, and so on,” says Egged. “I think that’s the kind of plan we need to work on together as a community because, otherwise, the whole issue starts to sneak up on you and become emergency situations. And that’s never the best way to do it.”

But that’s often how things work, with a dramatic event catalyzing change.

“Maybe it takes a major hurricane surge … to some of those high-value coastal areas for us to really become more serious about them, either rebuilding in a way that’s more resilient, or at least planning for future scenarios like sea level rise,” says Stilgenbauer. “Maybe that’s human nature.”

In September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service named the Phyllostegia glabra, a member of the mint family that grew in the moist forests of Lāna‘i, as lost to extinction.

It’s a familiar story in the Islands, where about 44% of the nation’s endangered and threatened plant species live a precarious existence. Scientists believe the isolation that allowed so many unique species to develop here has also left them vulnerable to changes in the ecosystem.

Today, about 90% of Hawai‘i’s flora are not found anywhere else, says Tim Chambers, rare plant program manager for the Army Natural Resources Program on O‘ahu, which partners with the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. About 10% of Hawai‘i’s original flora are already extinct, and over 30% are endangered, he says.

The Army’s seed conservation lab at Schofield Barracks works to stem the loss by maintaining a permanent stock of rare seeds, both to serve as “a kind of long-term Noah’s ark,” as Chambers puts it, and to propagate more plants. It currently houses 22,482,131 seeds.

To get them, field crews scour the Wai‘anae mountains for rare plants, traversing both Army lands and surrounding areas owned by the state, the Board of Water Supply and Kamehameha Schools. A sister program runs at the Army’s Pōhakuloa Training Area on Hawai‘i Island.

Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino

The seeds are painstakingly extracted, counted and weighed by hand, here by lab manager Makanani Akiona. They spend a month in dry chambers, a low-humidity environment that naturally extracts the seeds’ water without using damaging heat.  

Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino

Then it’s into the freezers for storage – sometimes for 20 years or more. Most seeds are stored at regular freezer temperatures of -18 degrees Celsius, but some need even colder temperatures to remain viable, from -80 degrees to -196 degrees Celsius.  

Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino

Seeds are regularly brought out of the freezers to germinate in the lab’s growing chambers, which mimic day and night, as well as the temperatures the plants like best.  

Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino

Here, tiny seedlings have sprouted in a petri dish of clear agar gel. They’re then moved with tweezers to a container of artificial soil, where they grow into robust Schiedea trinervis, an endangered member of the carnation family found only on Ka‘ala, the Wai‘anae Range’s highest peak.  

Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino

Photo: Aaron K. Yoshino

Once they get hardier, these and other varieties are transported to greenhouses or returned to the wild. About 2,000 endangered plants are replanted each year, along with 11,000 common plants. 

The seed lab also works to recover habitats, protecting plants from rodents, snails and other hungry creatures. Kapua Kawelo, natural resources program manager of the Army Garrison in Hawai‘i, says one of the program’s first successes was saving the Cyanea superba from extinction.  

In 1995, two years after the seed program began, there remained only five of the trees, whose Hawaiian name is haha. “We controlled the predators, secured the fruit and cultivated the plants for replanting,” says Kawelo. Now thousands are growing. “The Army is really a big player in Hawai‘i for the conservation of natural resources, in particular the conservation of plants,” she says. 

NAME: Alan Friedlander

JOB: Marine Biologist, Chief Scientist for National Geographic’s Pristine Seas Project and Director of UH’s Fisheries Ecology Research Laboratory

BEGINNINGS: “I grew up surfing on the East Coast and moved after college to San Diego for warmer waves,” he says. “I joined the Peace Corps and worked with the local fishing community on an outer island in Tonga.

“I realized how important healthy oceans were to people and the encyclopedic knowledge within a lot of these communities about how the ocean worked. I decided I wanted to try to understand and help protect the ocean for the benefit of all.”

So Friedlander got his master’s in oceanography, then worked in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and elsewhere in the Caribbean before getting his doctorate at UH.

CHALLENGES: “We work everywhere from the tropics to the poles. I’ve been in Antarctica and the Arctic. Diving under the ice has its own challenges. The first time I was in the Russian Arctic, I got frostbite and I’ve been chased out of the water by polar bears and walruses.”

Friedlander says he has been surrounded by a hundred sharks in the South Pacific and though he has not been bitten, a shark bit his team’s rubber boat once, he says. Luckily, the boat had multiple air compartments, so it was able to limp home.

TRAVEL: In addition to Antarctica and the Arctic, he’s been to seemingly countless exotic places.

“We were in Cape Horn, the most treacherous body of water on Earth at the southern tip of South America between the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Southern Ocean. Being in the middle of nowhere sometimes has crazy consequences but you see amazing things as well.”

He’s also been to Rapa Nui (Easter Island); the Juan Fernández Islands off Chile; the Galápagos; Malpelo Island off Colombia; Cocos Island, which is famous for its hammerhead sharks, off Costa Rica; the Revillagigedo Islands off Mexico; Niue, a small country between the Cook Islands and Tonga; Palau; Rapa Iti, one of the southernmost islands in French Polynesia; the Seychelles; Mozambique and Gabon in Africa; and in the Atlantic, the Selvagens, Azores and Tristan da Cunha, the most isolated populated island on earth.

“I think that’s probably it. How many is that?”

Photo: courtesy of Alan Friedlander

EQUIPMENT: “Before everything else, you need a boat and many places we go are so remote that it’s hard to find a nearby boat to charter.” When his team first went in 2005 to the Line Islands, which are south of Hawai‘i near the equator, the team used a rusted World War II boat that was falling apart.

“We ran out of food, all kinds of stuff. But it was kind of ‘misery loves company.’ It was such an amazing trip because we had this just great group of scientists on board and everybody was like a little kid out there.”

Friedlander says many of these places are relatively unexplored, so the teams do as much as possible.

That includes “basic scuba diving surveys for fish, coral, kelp or whatever is there. We do rebreathers with deeper diving or technical diving that can take us down 50 to 100 meters. We have used submersibles that got us down to 500 meters. We’ve used deep-water drop cameras that National Geographic developed in the deepest parts of the ocean, including the Marianas Trench.

“We do a lot of collecting, including water samples, looking at microplastics. We have been collecting microfossils in the sediment because they’re a good indicator of previous climates.”

MISCONCEPTIONS: “One misconception about most marine biologists is that you scuba dive all the time. That is actually my job, but most marine biologists aren’t as fortunate.

“I think a lot of people become biologists or scientists because they don’t like people or numbers, but having worked a lot on policy, you need skills with both. Being at sea for weeks can be challenging for people. Fortunately, we all get along very well.”

OCEAN MANAGEMENT: “The oceans are resilient and manage themselves very well. It’s people that need to be managed. We need to figure out the optimal way to balance human needs and a healthy ocean.”

COVID-19 PIVOTS: His last pre-pandemic expedition was to Palau. Since then, he’s done a lot of writing and worked at Pūpūkea on O‘ahu’s North Shore and at Molokini, off Maui.

He says many areas thrived during Hawai‘i’s tourism shutdown. “Nature rebounds really quickly when people go away. Even though Hanauma Bay, Pūpūkea and Molokini aren’t being fished, the animals respond negatively to too many people. They don’t reproduce the same way, they don’t feed the same way.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

New styles to suit every need, personality and driving desire are about to debut in the electric vehicle market. By 2045, forecasts suggest half the vehicles on Hawai‘i’s roads will be electric.

That’s half a million vehicles. The challenge facing the state and Hawaiian Electric Co.: Where will everyone plug them in?

“We have about 14,000 EVs on the streets now,” says Aki Marceau, Hawaiian Electric’s director of electrification of transportation. That’s about 1.4% out of 1.04 million passenger vehicles registered in Hawai‘i today.

That per capita rate puts Hawai‘i fourth or fifth highest among the states, Marceau says, but, “we’re still in the early adopter phase.”

The same goes for EV charging infrastructure: Hawai‘i is among the leading states but it’s still early and we have a fraction of the publicly available chargers that Hawai‘i’s drivers will eventually need for widespread EV use.

Chris Yunker, managing director of resilient clean transportation and analytics for the state Energy Office, says this about EV infrastructure: “We’re making good progress and are one of the leaders in the nation, but we have a ways to go.”

Marceau says Hawaiian Electric is committed to helping create that infrastructure.

“One of the biggest priorities for Hawaiian Electric is providing a network of chargers that anyone can access,” she says. “We want it to be reliable and serve our community.

“In the earlier days, especially when car batteries weren’t as powerful, there was concern around range anxiety. We’re hearing less of that now, and instead hearing charging anxiety – ‘Oh, maybe there’s someone at my charger.’ That’s one area of opportunity and we’re hoping to expand that.”

The momentum away from gasoline power and toward electric vehicles is widespread. President Joe Biden earmarked $174 billion in his proposed federal budget to support and invest in electric vehicles. General Motors has committed to phasing out all gas and diesel-powered vehicles by 2035, and other car companies worldwide are dramatically increasing EV production.

Beyond Single-Family Homes

HECO estimates there will be a need in 2030 for 46,720 private charging stations. That includes single-family homes, condominium buildings and the parking lots for fleets of company vehicles.

The utility also estimates there will be a need in 2030 for 3,651 public charging stations in the parking lots of places like shopping centers, rail stations, office buildings and hotels.

Many people and organizations have a stake in creating Hawai‘i’s EV infrastructure: car manufacturers and dealers; electric utilities; policymakers and government leaders at the county, state and federal levels; advocacy groups and oversight agencies such as the state’s Public Utilities Commission, which evaluates pilot programs that look at EV infrastructure strength and approves rates for charging stations.

Hawaiian Electric’s EV fast-charging station at Waianae Mall. | Photo: courtesy of Hawaiian Electric

Scott Glenn, chief energy officer in the state Energy Office, says there is a huge difference between how most EV owners charge their vehicles today and what is needed in the near future.

“Today, a lot of the conversation is if you have a charger. From the infrastructure point of view, if you live in a single-family home there’s no reason not to get an EV. You should be able to do your daily life on a charge.”

But if Hawai‘i wants widespread EV use, it will have to be easier for other people to charge: those living in condos or other multifamily buildings, people at work and tourists who rent cars.

Glenn says serving tourists means more than just adding charging stations to hotel parking lots. “The last thing we want is having a tourist drive to Hanauma Bay and not have a charge to get back to town,” he says.

Melissa Miyashiro is the managing director for strategy and policy at Blue Planet Foundation, which advocates for ending the use of fossil fuels. She suggests a policy that requires new construction to include EV charging infrastructure. “Vancouver is an interesting example because they require that new construction be 100% EV ready,” she says.

Glenn adds another issue: self-driving vehicles.

“If autonomous vehicles take off the way people are projecting, car ownership will be less,” Glenn says. “You call them for an errand, and then afterward your car drives off to help someone else. Where do we charge them? Who owns them? It could be a totally different paradigm of ownership in the next 10 years.”

Once finished, the Honolulu rail system will keep a lot of cars off the road and possibly fuel the need for charging stations where people park for rail trips.

Planning for the Future

Hawaiian Electricʻs 2019 report, “Critical Backbone Study: Planning Methodology,” quantified the need for both public and private EV charging.

“A main takeaway from the report,” Marceau says, is that by 2030 “there’s a seven times increase in need for public charging over existing development in 2019.”

The U.S. Department of Energy says Hawai‘i now has 361 EV charging stations statewide, with a total of 739 charging outlets or ports.

Twenty-five of those stations are fast or “super chargers” installed by Hawaiian Electric as part of a pilot program. Each has one outlet. You can most commonly find them in shopping centers and other commercial centers.

A DC fast charger takes just 15-30 minutes to fully charge a vehicle; an AC level 2 (240-volt) charger takes several hours; and the typical home charger, AC level 1 (120-volt), usually requires an overnight charge.

“When you go to the fast chargers that HECO has installed, they’re super convenient and they work in 20 to 30 minutes and you can run an errand and get on your way.” – James “Jay” Griffin, Chair, Public Utilities Commission

Hawaiian Electric says it plans to add four more fast chargers by the end of the year.

While the PUC has capped the number of fast chargers during this evaluation process, HECO is requesting approval to turn the pilot program “into a full program to expand our ability to own and operate public chargers,” says Marceau.

The PUC says it has sped up its evaluation process by following the model of Vermont, where there are quicker evaluations.

“We’ve tried to establish a structure that still has review and accountability, but more flexibility, so utilities can identify different concepts they want to test and learn more quickly if we want to go forward or not,” PUC chair James “Jay” Griffin says.

Marceau says Hawaiian Electric wants community feedback before determining how many chargers to install. “There are a few different steps that need to happen before we decide how many to apply for,” she says.

It costs HECO $150,000 to $175,000 to build a charging station, says Marceau, with the charger itself costing around $30,000 and the remainder covering infrastructure.

“We try to put it close to where infrastructure exists and not do a lot of utility realignment,” she says.

“Right now there’s a great need for charging so we want to make sure we have enough chargers in specific locations across our service territory. We have 40%-50% (of charging stations) on O‘ahu and the rest are 50/50 on Maui and the Big Island. I actually think we need more in the urban core. The ones on Ward Avenue are the most highly used.”

(Kaua‘i’s electricity comes from a coop, Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative.)

More Demand than Ever

Marceau says Hawaiian Electric saw a significant drop in charging starting in April 2020, early in the pandemic. But by December it had popped up again, and by January it was even greater than the year earlier. The utility’s pricing is based largely on solar power, which means the cheapest charging period is when the sun is shining. Prices rise in the evening, then decline again as people go to bed and the demand for power diminishes.

The public charging rate on O‘ahu is 49 cents a kilowatt-hour from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., rises to 57 cents from 5 to 10 p.m., and drops to 54 cents from 10 p.m. to 9 a.m.

Hawaiian Electric estimates that during the least expensive time on O‘ahu, it costs about $15.68 to charge a 2018 Nissan Leaf up to 80% capacity on a public fast charger. That compares to $8.64 on a level 1 charger at a private home during off-peak hours.

HECO also asked the PUC to approve two other pilot projects: the creation of 10 bus charging sites – approved on May 7 – and one for 30 commercial vehicle charging sites that would be used by businesses transitioning their fleets to EVs and other businesses. Both are “Make Ready” programs: Hawaiian Electric installs the infrastructure and another company installs chargers and maintains them.

“It’s not cheap to own and operate public charging and we support third-party charging as well,” says Marceau. “This allows the opportunity for others to provide public charging. Tesla is looking at providing some public charging in certain areas on O‘ahu right now, and an organization called Electrify America is looking at providing public charging on O‘ahu as well.”

The state Legislature passed bills this year to offer rebates for creating charging stations, and to direct 3 cents of the $1.05 tax per barrel on imported oil into a fund to pay those rebates. That 3 cents translates to between $700,000 and $800,000 a year.

“That’s an important piece of the puzzle,” says Glenn. “Since it’s a dedicated fund then businesses don’t have to fear it running out and missing it. Knowing that the fund is there, they could start working toward using it and applying for it.”

Here are prices per kilowatt/hour for Hawaiian Electric’s DC Fast Chargers on four islands. | *These four locations on Maui are offering discounted rates: Lahaina Aquatic Center, Queen Ka‘ahumanu Center, Pi‘ilani Village shopping center and Pukalani Terrace Center. | Source: Hawaiian Electric Co. Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative has not installed public charging stations, but private shopping centers on Kaua‘i have.

Targeted Money

Miyashiro of the Blue Planet Foundation applauds the Legislature’s new funding for the rebate program, which was established in 2019, but ran out of its original $400,000 in funding. “This provides more long-term funding,” she says. “We anticipate it to be more” than the original allocation.

The legislative bill allows a $4,500 rebate for installation of a new level 2 charger and $3,000 for a level 2 charger that replaces an old one, plus $35,000 for a new DC fast charger and $28,000 for a replacement.

Hawaiian Electric has also done its best to quantify how many different types of chargers will be needed going forward and where they should go, says the PUC’s Griffin.

“That has definitely helped us to understand what the trajectory is here. How do you decide how many is too much or too little? It’s a chicken and an egg analogy. But it depends on how many people are buying EVs and putting them on the road, so that charts the path forward. Our intent is to understand how quickly that will ramp up and will help us base approvals (of charging stations and pilot programs) to support that transition.”

This price is based on using Hawaiian Electric’s DC Fast Chargers on O‘ahu to charge a 2018 Nissan Leaf with a 40 kWh battery to 80% capacity.

Like many of the people interviewed for this story, Griffin has an EV and loves it, but is aware of the current shortcomings in the public charging infrastructure. He bought an EV to better understand the issues.

“It’s not as easy or convenient as a gas vehicle today,” he says. “I plug it in at night (at home) and it takes a few hours for a full charge. You’re still having to go and find other places to charge. At our office downtown there’s very little infrastructure nearby and when I’ve gone to it, it’s either occupied or not working. You’ve got to have a couple of backup plans.”

Griffin also closely compared the overall costs of his previous gas-powered vehicle to his EV. He used to spend about $200 a month on gasoline, and now spends $100-$120 extra on his electric bill to cover charging. Plus the EV’s upkeep and repairs tend to be much lower because there’s no internal combustion engine parts to fix or motor oil to change.

The cost of EVs will likely continue to fall, while the choice of vehicles and the demand for public charging both rise. “We’re going to see the demand for charging,” and with that, eventually more charging stations, Griffin says.

“When you go to the fast chargers that HECO has installed, they’re super convenient and they work in 20 to 30 minutes and you can run an errand and get on your way and that bodes well for the future,” says Griffin. “My understanding is that as the capabilities of those chargers continue to improve, convenience will continue to improve and you can charge quick enough that you feel comfortable with your driving range.”

Many Possibilities

Shopping centers and other private entities can also install charging stations in their parking lots – state law requires one charger per 100 parking spaces – and either absorb the cost as a perk for customers or pass it on.

“There are a few different models,” says Griffin. “You see this in the malls. They have chargers installed in their parking lots. Some are free, and basically the mall is paying the electric bill. Or they’re contracting with somebody to run the stations. You swipe your card and it’s charged as you plug in. It’s a private transaction. There are also third-party companies operating these networks but they’re still buying the power from HECO, unless you have PV locally onsite. If you have an electric connection, someone is paying an electric bill to supply that charger.

“(By 2030) there’s a seven times increase in need for public charging over existing development in 2019.” – Aki Marceau, Director of Electrification of Transportation, Hawaiian Electric Co.

“To the person driving up they all look the same. The question is making sure it’s more available, and the cost to do it is worthwhile.”

Carmakers are also looking at installing charging stations, Hawaiian Electric and others say. When that happens, it’s still HECO that sets the rate.

Plenty of electric cars, including sports cars and SUVs, exist and more models are on the way. For truck lovers, a couple of EV pickups have been unveiled by manufacturers and will be out by the end of 2022 or early 2023. President Biden was there for the unveiling of the Ford F150 Lightning in May.

“If you fall in love with the Lightning,” says Heather Cutter, president- elect of the Hawaii Automobile Dealers Association, “you could potentially get it at the end of 2022.”

“People love their trucks,” says Glenn of the state Energy Office. “The Toyota Tacoma is a top-selling truck in Hawai‘i and once those go electric, the demand will just flip. … Once that happens it’s game over for gas vehicles and internal combustion engines.”

Cutter agrees. “There are exciting developments because there are no current EV trucks and both GM and Ford are unveiling them. By 2035 every type of vehicle will have an electric version. That gives hope that the consumer demand will grow for EVs.”

Cutter, who is also president of Cutter Ford, Cutter Chevrolet and Cutter Mitsubishi, and VP of Cutter Management Co., likes the electric Mustang Mach-E, which can run 300 miles on a single charge. She’s on her second Mach-E now, a customized gunmetal gray on the outside with black interior.

“I’d be sitting on King Street at a red light and people would walk around it or take a lap around my car,” she says.

Cutter says it’s great fun to design your own car and tells the story of the husband of a friend who did that for an EV he’s buying. “I don’t think he’s been this happy since he got engaged,” she says with a laugh. “You’re invested in it and you’re willing to be patient and wait for your car to get here.”

The fast charger at Kapolei Shopping Center opened in 2020. | Photo: courtesy of Hawaiian Electric

New Way of Buying and Selling

EV sales are different. You don’t go to a lot and look over the offerings; you reserve a car online, perhaps design the interior and exterior you want, and then wait a year or so for it to arrive.

“We’re transforming the way we do business,” Cutter says. “We don’t have 20 Bolts sitting there. You go online and make a reservation and pay a deposit. And you can build it however you want. When it arrives you get to test drive it and see if it’s everything you hoped. If it’s not, the dealer won’t make you obligated. We’ll sell it to someone else.” Her dealership even returns the deposit if you don’t want the car in the end.

A certification program sponsored by Blue Planet Foundation has created a support system at dealerships. Sales associates earn their EV expert certification by learning about electric vehicle laws, incentives and facts that improve the buying experience for both buyer and seller.

“There are over 70 certified experts, and on different islands, that have the knowledge and resources to sell electric vehicles,” says Miyashiro. “And then we have a digital hub where Hawai‘i residents can go if they’re looking to purchase an EV and can look at a particular dealership, knowing that they have this training and can answer questions about these vehicles.”

Blue Planet is also the local administrator of the Clean Cities Coalition (previously Honolulu Clean Cities) – a program of the U.S. Department of Energy – and part of a nationwide lobbying effort for federal funds.

“There are 90 coalitions across the country, and we convene to talk about applying for federal funding and helping fleets transition,” says Miyashiro. “We can connect with other states that are in the process of transitioning their fleets, so they can share the lessons learned and help them connect to funding opportunities in the federal government.

“One of the challenges is Hawai‘i has a really hard time competing for these national pots of funding because there’s a very large matching component and it could be hard to make up that matching grant. But we’re optimistic with the new Biden/Harris administration that there will be new funding coming down the pike.”

3,000 State Light-Duty Vehicles

Another challenge, will be transitioning the state’s fleet of about 3,000 light-duty vehicles to EVs – about 1,000 light-duty passenger cars, 1,000 light-duty trucks, and another 1,000 multipurpose passenger vans and SUVs across all islands. There are another 2,000 pieces considered medium and heavy duty.

Yunker calls it an “aging fleet.”

“If we can start now replacing vehicles aging out at 10 to 15 years, we can do a natural transition of our fleet,” he says.

HB552, a bill passed this spring by the state Legislature and signed into law by Gov. David Ige, mandates that all state-owned light-duty vehicles will be electric or otherwise zero-emission by the end of 2035.

Beginning Jan. 1, 2022, all new passenger cars for the state’s fleet will be zero-emission vehicles, Yunker says.

Blue Planet’s Miyashiro says she’s already encouraged about the future.

“We’ve successfully gotten early enthusiasm around adopting EVs, but we need to transition into EVs across the economy,” she says. “That includes the visitor industry too and transitioning our rental car fleets. It has to be comprehensive and systemwide and that’s always a challenge. If rental car companies are able to resell their used rental cars, that would open up more affordable EVs in a secondary market – at a lower price point.

“The trend we’re seeing each month is the number of registered EVs increasing and the number of registered gas-powered vehicles decreasing. Even during the pandemic that trend was happening. It’s not happening fast enough, but it’s happening and that’s why we see the opportunity to create the future by design, and not default – and making sure we’re building a charging network with access for everyone.”

New Laws Support EV Infrastructure

The Legislature passed this spring and Gov. David Ige signed into law three bills that support electric vehicle infrastructure.

HB1142: Allocates 3 cents of the $1.05 tax on each barrel of imported oil to subsidize the construction of electric vehicle charging systems.

HB552: Sets the goals that all stateowned light-duty vehicles will be electric or other zero-emission vehicles by the end of 2035.

HB424: Requires state agencies to prefer renting electric or hybrid vehicles for state employees conducting government business.

At the heart of every thriving innovation community is a university or two that conducts research, educates and inspires young minds, generates cutting-edge ideas and fosters startups that take products and services to market.

UH, and especially the Mānoa campus, play that essential role for Hawai‘iʻs startup tech community and one of its recent and growing successes is Nalu Scientific. The company, founded in 2016 by Isar Mostafanezhad after conducting postdoctoral research in Mānoa’s Physics Department, focuses on advanced electronics, including interfacing with sensor applications in fast-timing measurements.

The company says its cutting-edge technology is used in many areas, including electron collider experiments, remote sensing applications in space, medical imaging technologies and underwater distance measurement using a method called lidar.

Ben Rotter, a physicist with Nalu Scientific, helps test a lidar microchip made by Nalu Scientific. Lidar stands for light detection and ranging, an advancement form of precise distance measurement. | Photo: courtesy of Nalu Scientific

Steve Auerbach, interim director of UH’s Office of Innovation and Commercialization, says Nalu has been awarded more than 23 federal Small Business Innovation Research grants and has received more than $10 million in funding in its five years.

“On this journey, Isar has collaborated with a number of UH researchers on research and product development, employed a number of UH students and UH graduates, mentored innovators and entrepreneurs looking to follow in his footsteps, and has volunteered his time in various ways to support UH’s and the state’s efforts to diversify the economy,” Auerbach says.

“As a UH alumnus, Isar is an inspiration to students and researchers and a role model for those looking to join forces with the innovation and entrepreneurship community to create more high-tech jobs for our local students and diversify our economy.”

Kenneth Lauritzen started as a Nalu intern while a UH engineering student and now works there as a junior engineer. “If not for Nalu Scientific, I would have moved out of Hawai‘i for a job in my field. There are very few opportunities in Hawai‘i as interesting as the one that Nalu Scientific provides,” he says.

Senior engineer Ryan Pang had spent 10-plus years on the Mainland working on aerospace, automotive and consumer electronic systems. “Nalu Scientific allowed me to return to Hawai‘i and to remain in an R&D-centric engineering position rather than having to transition into a different engineering role,” he says.

Mostafanezhad calls UH a “first class university” and says he’s glad Nalu has allowed some of its graduates to live in Hawai‘i while working in high-tech jobs. “My family had to come to the United States to have an opportunity to develop our talents and thrive. I understand what a sacrifice it is to leave home in order to build a successful life,” he says.

“I’m grateful that Nalu has made it possible for many locals to study and work toward a career in engineering, and then be able to have an engineering job right here in Hawai‘i.”

“Work from home has a new meaning today, but for kama‘āina, it has been a common and persistent goal to be able to stay in or return to Hawaii. To be able to earn a living here and actually enjoy the quality of life only Hawaii offers is something I hope every local company will be able to provide.”

Part of the process for building one of Nalu Scientific’s custom-made microchips. | Photo: courtesy of Nalu Scientific

Auerbach says UH’s Office of Innovation and Commercialization fosters collaboration between UH and the community to innovate local businesses and create high-quality jobs. “Nalu is a prime example of this and Isar is working with UH OIC to share his knowledge and replicate and scale his successful model,” Auerbach says.

“I view the work that Nalu Scientific is doing as a force multiplier.”

He says UH’s research and academic enterprise brings in more than $400 million in annual outside funding. “Partnerships and collaboration with the private sector is foundational for a thriving innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.”

He says one way to grow the local innovation community is to inspire more young minds. “In my opinion, we need to do more in the area of outreach and engagement with our K-12 and postsecondary students in helping them understand, appreciate and engage in innovation and entrepreneurship.

“When we have cool, deep tech/science/STEM startups like Nalu Scientific for the next generation to see, touch and interact with, great things will come from this.”

The most promising part of Nalu’s work is Mostafanezhad’s team culture, Auerbach says.

“He has embraced and put into practice a culture of innovation, entrepreneurship and community engagement. He spends time working with UH and the next generation of founders to help them navigate their research, technology and startup journey. … Isar combines his deep understanding of complex scientific and technical problems with his business acumen to develop solutions that fit market needs, which in turn, helps our community diversify the economy.”

Pang, the senior engineer, is optimistic about the future for both Nalu and Hawai‘i’s broader scientific community. “I think that Nalu Scientific has a lot of potential to help build Hawai‘i’s high-tech economy,” he says.

“I think there’s a misconception of what it takes to be a technology company in Hawai‘i. In this day and age, the ability to coordinate and collaborate with people around the world is as easy as a click of a button. It’s as easy to develop here in Hawai‘i as in Silicon Valley,” Pang says.