Senate Standing Committee on Agriculture and Environment

Hello, Mai Kakou. And good morning.

Mahalo for participating in today's info briefing on climate change and special mahalo to the Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Commission, also known as less formally as the Climate Commission, for putting this event on as I begin my ninth year as the Senate Agriculture and Environment Chair and as we begin the 2025 session tomorrow.

What better way to start the new year than to focus on our island paradise and what we all can do to help keep paradise, paradise.

So while I was riding on the train from Kapolei this morning and noticing all the cars stuck on H1 and smiling very humbly, two words kept pounding in my head and in my heart. Malama and Laulima. Yeah, Malama. Protecting and taking care of our land, our oceans and the air that we breathe. And also Laulima.

In order to accomplish that, it's going to take many hands working together to accomplish that goal. So I'd like to introduce the other legislators that are in the room from the Agriculture Environment Committee. Senator Rhodes is here. Senator, if you'll introduce yourself and what district you represent. Hello, Carl Rhodes. I represent District 13.

And you're in District 13 right now. So welcome to downtown Honolulu. So any complaints, write to this guy here. Okay. And then any other legislators in the room.

Okay.

All right. So now I'd like to introduce Leah Laramie. She's the Climate Change coordinator of the Climate Commission and she'll be emceeing the program today. Take it away, Leah.

Mahalo, Chair Gabbard. And mahalo Senator Rhodes, for having us here today. Leah Laramie with the Climate Change Mitigation Adaptation Commission.

Really just thankful for you to host this really important session where we're going to have a great selection of speakers, come and share just some thoughts and some latest science and what's been going on in the climate world in the State of Hawaii.

Obviously there's a lot of activities going on so we couldn't touch on everything, but we really wanted to focus on the topics of the day that things that we're hopefully going to be seeing this year during the legislative session and provide some information to follow up on that.

The Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Commission, for those of you folks that don't know, is a multi jurisdictional Commission. We consist of 12 state agencies and offices, all four county planning departments and four legislative representatives, including Senator Gabbard here. And that really makes it a unique opportunity for us to talk about climate change across boundaries.

As we know, climate change doesn't recognize, you know, political or other boundaries and really impacts us all. So it's a great opportunity. Just mahalo to everyone here who came to speak and share their voices and. Yeah, I think we'll get started. Mahalo.

So first we have some speakers from the Climate Future Forum and I'll invite them to come up and introduce themselves because I know that they have been really passionate about being able to come and we've had quite a few join us. So I invite you all to come down.

Yeah, give him a big hand. All right.

Pull up a chair. Make yourselves at home and pull the mic close to you so we make sure we get good. Yeah. Thank you.

Aloha. Our names are Liv, Tahan, Maya and Vivian. Today we represent the Climate Future Forum to press the need for legislative environmental change. We also represent the other 200,000 youth in Hawaii who are desperate for a safe, affordable and eco friendly future.

Throughout this legislative session, you, the legislators, have the opportunity to be able to change our future. You have the power to take positive action. Just in our lifetimes, each summer has been the hottest on record. Beaches have completely disappeared and storms and floods have led to more deaths than ever.

At the Climate Future Forum last November, young leaders from across the state came together to develop actionable solutions to our most pressing issues. The Climate Future Forum has chosen a few priorities that we deem most important. We urge you to support our goals simultaneously supporting Hawaii's current and future citizens.

Climate justice is a critical issue as it impacts minorities and economically disadvantaged communities. Sea level rise especially is increasingly rapid. A few weeks ago, I went to my favorite beach in Kailua, only to find that the rock wall had been almost demolished due to strong winds and growing waves. For me, this was only an inconvenience.

But over 100,000 people live near the coast. Rising seas could mean the loss of livelihoods and homes very soon. An important piece of legislation for this is the Bill of Rights for Hawaiian Islands Coral Reefs.

This Bill states that the Hawaiian island coral reefs possess the right to naturally exist to a climate system unaltered by human cost pollution and to a natural environment unaltered by human caused pollution.

This Bill is a crucial step towards recognizing the rights of Hawaii's ecosystems and citizens, ensuring the communities most at risk are protected from the devastating effects of climate change.

Aloha. I'm Maya Gaudiano, a sustainability fellow through Punahou School and a part of the Leadership Group for Regenerative Agriculture at Climate Future Forum. This island, pre Western contact, used to be able to support a population similar to the size that we have today without any reliance on imported goods, solely eating meals cultivated from the land and ocean.

Today, my diet, like the one of almost everyone else on this island, consists mainly of imported goods. As around 90% of our food is shipped from the mainland, a huge amount of these imported goods are coming from inorganic, unsustainable food systems on the mainland or overseas.

These farms are major contributors to greenhouse gas production, polluting the atmosphere with methane or carbon dioxide, while polluting environmental necessities such as vital waterways through the overuse of fertilizers or harmful pesticides. The current reality of our food system is extremely unsustainable.

In this session, we urge the Legislature to focus on promoting local farmers, providing long term contracts and stability so that we're able to grow local, organic, healthy foods that feed our family, friends and island communities. Post meal food scraps should be directed toward composting facilities that have access to infrastructure that can compost primarily on island.

This compost can be recycled back to local farms, closing the food system loop. Promoting these regenerative local food systems will help to provide a secure future for the current generations and those to follow. Thank you.

Aloha My name is Vivian and I'm a senior at Prisma High School. When I was younger living in Singapore, I experienced the devastating effects of unsustainable practices in nearby Indonesia. Palm trees were purposefully burned to clear land, cheaply blanketing the region in thick smoke. This haze forced us indoors, sometimes for weeks.

It was suffocating, isolating and deeply saddening. A constant reminder of what happens when we fail to act on environmental issues. When I moved here five years ago, I knew I needed to ensure that such devastation does not become a reality in Hawaii.

Hawaii has such an incredible opportunity to take the lead in climate resilience, and the voices of its youth are paving the way. The Sustainable Infrastructure Working Group of the Climate Future Forum focused on addressing housing challenges with policies to protect renters from evictions and discrimination, strengthen tenant rights and create stable housing environments.

They also proposed efforts to prevent gentrification by curbing displacement caused by wealthier foreigners buying homes and suggested optimizing construction costs and locations. Finally, the group emphasized the importance of community land trusts and refurbishing unused properties to create affordable, sustainable housing.

These ideas reflect the priorities of Hawaiis youth, ensuring housing stability, equity and sustainability while building strong, resilient communities.

Aloha My name is Tahan Batna and I'm here on behalf of the Climate Future Forum's Clean Energy and Transportation group as well as the Sustainability Fellowship When I was younger living in India, I saw some of the harshest impacts of climate change, from deadly air pollution to paralyzing heat waves and intense flooding.

Witnessing these first, firsthand, kind of worst effects of climate change deeply shaped my passion to protect these communities that I call home. I'm passionate about ensuring that the devastation that I saw back then will never become a reality again.

Moving to Hawaii in the Sustainability Fellowship at Punahou, we learned the concept of 113 which reminds us that by coming together, we can accomplish far more than what we could do on our own.

This spirit of collaboration is exactly what Hawaii needs now to reshape our transportation system so it truly serves both our people and our Ina. For starters, we need safer sidewalks, bike lanes and complete streets that make greener travel the easy natural choice for everyone.

At the same time, we must ramp up our electric vehicle infrastructure, making sure charging stations are accessible and affordable, no matter where on the island you live. By passing clear legislation, we can build fast, convenient charging across all our island communities. None of us can do this alone.

It's going to take all of us, government leaders, businesses, local communities and young people to support these changes.

We now ask you, our legislators, to take these steps now so that future generations can look back and see how Hawaii came together to build a clean, sustainable transportation system that keeps our roads safe, our air fresh and our islands dark. Mahalo.

Thank you.

Aloha. My name is Tae Song and I am part of I'm a junior at Iolani School with Climate Future Forum. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I stand before you as a representative of my generation, one deeply concerned about the future we will inherit. Climate change is no longer just an issue.

It is here now, affecting ecosystems, communities and livelihoods. Rising seas, diminishing coral reefs, and increasingly frequent natural disasters remind us daily of the stakes. What makes this crisis particularly significant is its cross generational impact. The choices we make today will shape not only the world we live in, but the one our children and grandchildren will inherit.

As a young person, I recognize my generation's responsibility to contribute to solutions. We are organizing, advocating and using every platform available to push for meaningful change. But the scale of this challenge requires collaboration across generations and at every level of the government.

Efforts like the climate briefing we're at today show how eager and committed young people are to to being part of the solution. What we ask for is for leaders like you to help amplify this momentum and create a framework where real systemic progress can happen. Together, we can rise to meet this Challenge.

I have great hope that through your leadership, we can ensure a livable and sustainable future for generations to come. Thank you for your time and for your dedication to this critical issue. Mahalo.

Sure. I'd like to introduce my Vice Chair for a and Committee. Jim, if you'd introduce yourself, we also have a representative could introduce yourself and what district you represent.

Yeah. Aloha, everyone. I'm Senator Tim Richards. I'm from the Big island, representing District 4. Stretches from North Hilo through Hamakua, North, South Kohala and down into North Kona.

Good morning. Kim Kopo Iwamoto, State representative of District 25. Thank you, Kim. Anyone else?

Keep going. Thank you, Red.

Okay, Leah, any time for questions?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, any questions for our. You.

All right? Mahalo for that message.

As a former high school English teacher, I just. You guys warm my heart. Just. We never even talked about this kind of stuff when I was back in high school, so this is just. Wow. Thank you so much.

Chair, just quick comment. No questions. And sorry, a little late, but I just appreciate the fact that we have youth in here in this building talking.

And I have a standing policy in my office that anybody 18 and under that wants to meet with me, you get bumped to the head of the line, and I'll bump a meeting with the Governor to talk to young people.

I also want to add one other thing, and that is that food systems is one of my top priorities. Maya. So let's talk offline and get any ideas that you want in terms of legislation. We'll talk. Okay. All right. Thank you. Another hand, please.

I can have a picture.

How about them behind us? How's that? Yeah, there you go. That would be better.

Definitely is youth voices that keep us inspired every day. So mahalo to all of you folks for coming and speaking.

Okay123.

One23. One23.

There you go. That's important. Thanks again.

All right, Next, we'll invite Dr. Charles Fletcher, also known as Chip, who is interim dean, the School of Ocean and Earth Science Technology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He also serves on the governor's climate advisory team.

Let me get my timing device going here.

That didn't work. Thank you, Chair, Members of the Committee, I'm going to go through some of the global context for climate change and get right into the weeds with regard to Hawaii. So the data came out on Friday that last year, 2024 was the warmest year on record.

The average surface temperature of the planet reached 1.6 degrees Celsius, breaking the United nations threshold of 1.5 Celsius that all of the world's nations had pledged to work towards decreasing their greenhouse gases and stopping warming. At 1.5, CO2 emissions are still rising around the world.

Last year, the rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere rose 86% above the previous year. This is the fastest in recorded history. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C would require global emissions reductions of 9% per year. This target is no longer practical.

If you think of the COVID pandemic and the recession that was associated with that, emissions only went down 5.4%. And here to stop at 1.5, they need to go down 9%. So this is no longer a practical target. And here we have global energy use from 1960 up to present day.

And all of these lines represent renewable energy. These lines represent fossil fuel energy. Basically. Despite efforts to decarbonize, global coal production reached a record high last year. Coal accounts for one quarter of the world's total energy consumption. And as you know, coal is the dirtiest form of energy.

Despite the promise of a green revolution, oil, gas and coal still account for 82% of the global energy mix. This number has not budged in decades. Economists argue that energy transitions often simply add new sources rather than replace old ones, accelerating overall consumption.

Experts suggest that true solutions require drastically reducing energy and material use, not relying on new energy sources. In a nutshell, here's the United States issue. Even as renewables accelerate, so does the demand for energy. The green line is clean energy deployment in the United States, and the red line is dirty energy deployment in the United States.

So clean energy is simply feeding our thirst for more and more forms of energy worldwide. Developing nations are turning to fossil fuel energy to increase and improve their lifestyle. New transportation systems, new medical systems, new schooling systems. Fossil fuel energy is the source at hand for them.

And in the developed world, the growth of AI data centers is a new form, a new demand on energy. Charging stations for EVs are expanding. And the number one demand for energy last year was for air conditioning. Talk about irony.

Here in Hawaii, this is our observed temperature change from the five longest weather stations going back to 1950. Since then, temperature in Hawaii has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Last year, 2024, Pukuhola, Kaneohe Bay, South Point, Big island and Mauna Loa all recorded their highest ever annual maximum temperatures, reflecting persistent warming trends across the state for the entire year. Here's observed precipitation change. We've seen a decline of about 20% since 1920. Statewide, heavy rainfall events and droughts have become more common.

Consecutive wet days and dry days are both increasing. Last year, 22 weather stations across the state recorded their highest ever daily rainfall totals, 17 stations their highest ever monthly rainfall totals, and 13 stations their highest ever annual rainfall totals. Notice the graph and the high variability that this graph shows.

Largely, this is controlled by El Nino and La Nina. And we transitioned from an El Nino into a La Nina over the course of the last six months or so. This highlights the increasing intensity of localized extreme precipitation events, of course, leading to flooding. A new paper was published last year.

It modeled the development of tropical cyclones around the world. And you'll see, here in the central North Pacific, tropical cyclone occurrence is projected to strongly increase. These bright yellow numbers indicate a near doubling of tropical cyclone occurrence by the end of the century. As we warm the air, the ocean absorbs that heat.

And thermal expansion of the ocean is the predominant driver of sea level rise. We tend to think more simply of Ayes melting, and that's extremely important. But the oceans are still cooler than the global average temperature, and so they are absorbing heat.

90% of the excess heat created by greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is absorbed in the ocean. This is the record of sea level rise around the world from a series of satellite missions that use satellite altimetry to measure the ocean surface. And the rate of sea level rise has doubled in the past 30 years, globally.

Here in Hawaii, when sea level rises, it often fills in our storm drainage systems with salt water, especially at high tide. It also drives up the water table in the coastal zone.

And given the increase in intense extreme precipitation, should we get rain and high tide occurring at the same time, you end up having compound flooding because there's no more drainage. Fundamentally, in Waikiki and most of the Honolulu urban core, at high tide, there's no more gravity based drainage. We need to turn to pumped drainage.

And this will only get worse. Here's the basement of a hotel in Waikiki where Dr. Shelly Habel, who models groundwater change with sea level rise, is measuring the salinity of the water and finding near ocean levels of salinity. And that's groundwater there. Coming up in through the floor.

And if you notice the round columns in the back, those used to be square columns such as in the foreground, but the owners have wrapped those square columns to avoid the corrosion that comes with saltwater intrusion. So that is already an adaptation response on the behalf of the hotel industry.

And of course coastal erosion is a major problem. And something many people don't think about is that it leaves our in ground sewage disposal systems exposed on the shoreline as the shoreline recedes. That's a cesspool in windward Oahu. Every red.is a cesspool or septic tank on this island.

And the vast majority of them are both being flooded by groundwater rise from below and then exposed by shoreline recession as well. The rate of MRSA and staff in Hawaii is twice the average on the continent.

Average daily wind speeds are declining, the number of trade wind days is declining, and trades are coming more from the east than the northeast. So they represent less cooling and also less cloud production. There's been a 400% increase in wildfire on this island since the 1960s.

And globally, climate change intensified 26 of the 29 extreme weather events that happened last year, killing 3,700 people and displacing millions. Global warming caused an additional six weeks of dangerously hot days last year for the average person, supercharging the fatal impacts of heat waves around the world.

As one example, the Central Valley of California, which supplies 25% of the food to the United States, spent weeks at 125 degrees Fahrenheit. The farm workers shifted from daytime shifts to nighttime shifts. They had to work at night. How's my time? This is my last slide. I could talk a little bit about the climate advisory team. Okay.

Well, that was fairly discouraging. You have. Are you and other climatologists, what are you thinking in terms of what the course of action should be at this point?

Well, I tend to think in terms of Hawaii. I've begun to think of our need for clean energy more and more as a need for self sufficient energy, resilient energy, because these extreme weather events interrupt supply lines and we are still so dependent on external forms of energy.

And so the deployment of solar and wind and geothermal are all the key to building resilience in Hawaii. Yes, we get a clean energy benefit as well, but I think of it more in terms of the safety of our islands. And the same goes for food.

And basically, as one of the prior speakers said, every day there's a ship or container ship that comes into Honolulu harbor that's our lifeline. And we need to decrease our dependence on external sources of everything.

First of all, I'm going to disagree with my colleague. It's not slightly discouraging. It's really discouraging.

I'm just a reporter.

This is that data. I'm curious if we can get a copy of your presentation. Number one, is there a measurement? I'm not sure how we measure energy. Because you have the tracking of increasing in fossil fuel and increasing in renewable energy, and they're tracking side by side, and you're just bolstering the demand for energy.

And I don't know if you're. Is there a calculation and how you measure it? Is it in Watts? Is it in joules? Joules, okay.

They had the same vertical axis on that plot, so they were equivalent.

But is it. Do you have one that's calculated against population growth?

That's a good question. I. Population growth is a huge issue. It's part of the amplifying factors here. I'll have to look.

And I'd appreciate that because what I'm looking for is the number of joules per person demand over time. And are we increasing that? And if so, I don't have an answer, but I'm just trying to get an understanding. So I appreciate that information. Thank you.

Chip, I may have misheard you, but on the slide projection, you were saying that not focusing on new energy, new clean energy, but reducing. Right, that's what you said. Yes. So my ask. My question is, how are you on offshore wind?

And, yeah, I'm very much in favor of offshore wind. And the wind project that I'm aware of is 12 miles offshore off the windward side. I am a Member of one of the communities that will be visually impacted by that. And I. I would feel enormous pride looking at wind turbines in the distance.

And even if they were up close, I'd feel enormous pride. Thank you. Yeah.

Okay. I have one other, if you don't mind. So, I mean, it took us a couple two or 300 years to get to this point. There's already technology to take carbon back out of the air and resequester it, which essentially is what fossil fuel is. If we come up with some kind of a technological.

Well, let me back up a little. So the first question is, so we've. Missed our target, but that does not mean we should stop trying to reduce carbon emissions. Every tenth of a degree matters. Yes.

Okay.

So if we figure out a way to pull the carbon back down, which, I mean, technically it's possible, you Just need lots of energy. What will the process eventually reverse itself in 500 years or 1,000 years?

Yeah, on that time frame, yes.

So the human race just has to survive the next four or 500 years before it starts becoming a salubrious climate again.

That's correct. But we have other global issues as well. We have pollution, disease, social inequality and biodiversity destruction. It's not just about climate change anymore. It's a poly crisis.

But it's driven largely by climate change though.

Climate change is an amplifier, but these correcting climate change alone will not fix these other problems. Okay, all right, thanks. Thanks, Sheriff. Thank you, Chip. Thank you.

We might have misordered these. I think we should have had the youth come after Chips. We could have been a little effortless, uplifted.

But I just want to quickly recognize Marielis Evans, who is in the room, who is one of the co chairs for the Climate Change Mitigation Adaptation Commission, as well as the Director of the Office of Planning and Sustainable Development.

Leah, I also want to recognize another Legislator who entered. Would you please state your name and what district you represent? Thanks, Amy.

And next I will invite Susan Crow or Dr. Susan Crow, who is a Professor and researcher focused on carbon sequestration, greenhouse gas flux, nutrient and water management and natural and managed forest and agricultural ecosystems, and a soil scientist here to talk about climate ready landscapes and communities.

Thank you Chair Gabbard and Committee Members and everyone who is here for your time. My name is Susan Crow, Professor at University of Hawaii Manoa. And it's good that I get to go after Chip sobering statistics with a little bit of hope, I hope, and some implementation that's already happening on the ground here in Hawaii.

So we stay climate ready because that is more inclusive of mitigation, only pulling CO2 and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, but also helping people, landscapes and communities prepare for what is to come so that we are in a better place. So we're focused on just in actionable solutions that are tailored specifically to Hawaii.

So what is climate ready agriculture? It's a collaborative effort across multiple sectors of agriculture, so inclusive of forests, agroforest, pasture, croplands. Meeting this urgency that you've already heard here today for actionable change in our managed landscapes with meaningful improvements to our climate readiness.

So these efforts across the full spectrum of the agricultural sector can also be environmentally impactful and address multiple insecurities, including some of those that have already been raised. 90%, imported food, household insecurity at 30%, only having five to seven days, commercial food stocks 40% of our non productive agricultural lands just sit fallow.

And this enormous fossil energy dependence, we can together achieve multiple goals and mandates that already exist. Doubling local food production, building resilient sustAinable food systems, decarbonization efforts and looking towards a more Aina aloha economic future for Hawaii. Most critically, we are at a crossroads.

Right now there's a widespread acknowledgement for the need of decolonization, the legacy of degraded soils that result in fire and floods and also conflict in land transitions that must be overcome collaboratively, collectively, if we're one to meet our goals and needs.

So specifically, some of our ongoing work centers right now on our $40 million USDA funded Climate Smart Commodities Award that we brought here to Hawaii on the PI. It is a huge collaborative effort. Excuse me. We call ourselves the Hawaii Climate Smart Partnership. We are here as a partnership for Hawaii.

Over on the graphic on the right you can see that we're here in this project to to serve producers and practitioners and meet those needs. Particularly focused on small and medium sized producers and practitioners. We're focused on policy and markets as our sustainability plan. And we have as a foundation equitable decision making.

Our outcomes can push the needle on decarbonization, resilient food systems and that aloha Ina based economy. But we are a five year funding period. We're a flash in the pan. And so a lot of our work really focuses on this interrelated effort at the state and to support other policy related and market outcomes.

A lot of our equitable and just climate assessment framework centers on this idea that warming mitigation is not enough. We have to prepare our landscapes and communities for readiness for what is to come.

And that is that we are developing a Hawaii Climate Smart multi metric that covers a lot of those multiple dimensionalities, those other factors that are inclusive of warming mitigation and soil health, but also human nutrition, indigenous well being and genealogies, community and economic well being as well as a circular economy. And a circular economy is really critical.

How do we make sure that we last longer than our five year period and our budget? We're working directly with the state and the Commission. Multiple climate action pathways, circular and well being, economy, improved inventory and approaches as well as a meaningful inclusion of natural and working lands.

We also work closely with Leah and others in the Carbon Smart Land Management Assistance pilot program that already exists. We can get it past being pilot and into permanency and also help represent the state at the U.S.

climate Alliance Natural and Working Lands Initiative where we write policy and interface with others across the country, which will become increasingly important after next week. So what do we need? Our producers and practitioners are ready to implement these practices across our landscapes through across the islands.

What they face are enormous barriers to put into the ground specific practices that we know to build climate readiness through mitigation and adaptation. Some of these are here on this slide. On the right, on the left. So what can we do?

Key solutions and opportunities here are to do anything legislatively that removes barriers to accessing funds that already exist. Any barriers to things that can pull from waste streams. Nobody wants landfills. Let's not put anything in the landfill that we can use to support our local farmers. For example, compost has already been mentioned. Biochar, fish bone meal.

This also has many other environmental benefits beyond simply keeping things out of the landfill and producing sustainable organic, locally derived fertilizer for our farmers. Long term land leases and affordability are always at the top of our producer and practitioners barriers to implementing good practices.

We can adopt that more equitable just climate ready assessment framework that I described to support local food production and back emergent markets. And we can provide, you can provide help provide sustained funding for climate ready land management practices, especially, especially on those currently non productive agricultural lands.

I will leave it there and ask if there are any questions.

So Susan, you said that 40% of our ag lands are non productive.

Yeah.

So one of the things that I've learned over my time as chair, how do you attract young people to get involved in farming? Every time I speak to young people, one of my punchlines is farming is a noble profession. No less noble than being a Doctor or lawyer or Professor. Right. And the land's there.

But we need farmers.

Well, we have lots of young people who very much want to be part of, you know, the solutions to these problems. And farming and food systems systems are certainly part of it.

And when we talk to the producers and practitioners who are already there on the ground, they say, and they know there are lots of people who want to do it. It's these many and complex barriers that folks face to actually getting access to land.

So the leases, the affordability, so anything that can be put in place to take down that barrier, that is one of the biggest ones.

Because once you have access to those longer term leases and land, then a starting farmer, there's actually a lot of resour available at the federal level and hopefully more and more at the state level that once they have that ownership or that long term Kuleana responsibility to that land that comes with a long term lease, then they can actually just access funds that already exist.

That's heartbreaking to hear that there are folks who want to do it and that there's money available, but there's just so many things that are in the way.

So with our project we're focused on identifying what those barriers are, trying to figure out the ones that we can do something about and do it and then do things like this coming out and do this outreach to identify other areas.

One thing is that you can support young farmers not just as someone who's producing food, but someone who's producing that, who is feeding their community. Right. And that's a decolonized economic component. Right. You don't just have to take to be a farmer. You don't have to take it to market and sell.

You can trade, you can gift, you can donate into your community and uplift your community and meet the food and nutritional needs there in people's places. And that also should have an economic value. And so we can do the math, but you have to have the systems in place at the state.

Like the Genuine Progress Indicator is a good starting point. And the SOLOA Ina Economic Futures is a framework, but we're here to implement. So we're hoping that people see us as a five year opportunity to Fund this research and development, implement. But how are we going to keep it going?

And that's the critical component and it's those barriers. As soon as you can tackle those barriers, you'll get young people supporting their community and their families.

And to be clear, the $40 million that was just for Hawaii for five years, is that correct? That's correct. And how did you get the word out to the farming community?

We are working with a coalition of partners, so we call them the Producer Engagement Team. We started with five and it kind of, we're pulling people in as we go, but we partnered with those community based producer organizations like Oahu, RC&D, Hawaii Cattlemen's Council, Hawaii Farmers Union United and folks like that, Kohala Center.

They're the ones who are already there, grounded in place, including the Hamakua Coast. So some of our greatest work is getting done there. And we went through those folks who already had those relationships with, with the producers and practitioners to reach our producers and practitioners directly.

And we have another RFA coming out that will do a phase two. So folks that we didn't reach at that initial point, we're now doing outreach efforts very specifically trying to reach those smaller and very underserved producers here in Hawaii. Indigenous practitioners, small farmers, new farmers to Help them.

We have a few more $1.0 million to give out to get these practices in the ground.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Okay. Yes.

I enjoyed that. A couple of questions I have for you. Your statement, 40% of our agricultural lands are fallow or being unused for agriculture. Define that please. How many acres are you calculating total agriculture? And that would almost half not be used if you don't have that number.

If you didn't memorize the number of them, you should have known it be asked. But there's a paper that was published recently that has a very specific tied to geospatial land use, baseline history and then current land use. And it totals about 25% of our total land area across this states. But I don't have my acreage. Okay.

So if you could get that data for me and actually give it to chair and he'll share with the Committee. I do know that our state's about 4 million acres, 1 million acres is managed by DLNR. Some of that is agriculture. About 750,000 acres plus minus have influence of agriculture.

And I'm curious, for instance, Hamakua, we have a lot of trees, all the planted trees from 20 plus years ago. Now how are you characterized or how is this characterized? Because I am curious about this Chair's always heard me say this. I'm from agriculture and in agriculture inherently optimistic because you have to be.

But that being said, if we can, I'd like to see the data on that where we go. And I completely agree with you. Land access and tenure, water access and tenure are some of the barriers that we run into. So that's where policy comes out of this group to allow people to get in.

And I feel fortunate in my district, I got young farmers. The problem is they're bumping up against the wall that we have to clear that for them. So anyway, I appreciate that. I'd like to see that data.

Yeah, no problem. Thank you. Thank you.

Next, I'd like to invite Amy Wirtz. Amy serves on the as a Coastal Lands Program Coordinator, the Hawaii Sea Grant and the Department of Land and Natural Resources with the Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands. Thanks for joining, Amy.

Good afternoon, Senators. As Leah said, my name is Amy Wirtz.

I'm a Hawaii Sea Grant Extension Agent who works as the Coastal Lands Program Coordinator with the Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands in the Department of Land and Natural Resources and also work a lot with Leah and the Climate Commission on addressing sea level rise issues around the state or planning for them.

So today I would like to just. Take a few minutes to talk about coastal hazards and sea level rise. Chip pretty much summed up the issue. About sea level rise, so going into. The science doesn't seem necessary, but it is an issue here.

These graphs here are from the 2017 sea level rise Vulnerability and Adaptation Report that was prepared by the Climate Commission and demonstrates the acres of flooded land that will be in the sea level rise exposure area.

That's what the SLRXA or Celerexa as we commonly call it, are and broken down by island and then how that relates to the number of flooded structures. So Hawaii shorelines and the coastal development along it are exposed to myriad coastal hazards which are being exacerbated now by sea level rise.

The sea level rise exposure area is comprised of highway flooding, annual passive flooding, and coastal erosion altogether. And those coastal erosion numbers are based on work that was done by Dr. Fletcher's lab over years of determining the rate of erosion along the shorelines.

In both 2017 and again in 2020, the Honolulu harbor tide gauge recorded the highest daily mean water. Those were a combination of high wave setup, a large of warm water that was moving through the Pacific and high astronomical tides. But those were the highest in the recorded history.

We've seen a lot of high rainfall with the high water levels, which has resulted in some of that flooding, the compound flooding like Chip was talking about as well. Not only in Waikiki, around the Punapuna, in particular on Oahu itself. And then we've seen chronic coastal erosion along the majority of the state's coastlines.

On Oahu, three houses that have been, well, two that were damaged and fell onto the shoreline in the last few years, another that was proactively taken off in Maui. Specifically, there is condominium infrastructure and hotel resort infrastructure that is being actively threatened by erosion. So that is the issue itself, the ongoing work and updates to that.

In 2017, the Climate Commission prepared the Sea Level Rise Vulnerability and Adaptation Report as required by the Legislature. That mandate also came with a requirement to update that every years.

In 2022 we did an interim update report which basically went through to identify update the science and identify the progress towards the nine recommendations and 17 recommended action items that were recommended by the 2017 report. And those results are in that middle graphic there.

What we did in that was to collect all of the actions that have been taken across all the state and county agencies that are responsive to the recommendations that were made in the report. And there's just a few examples there.

And the third part of that slide of guidance for using the sea level rise exposure area in planning decisions and in permitting the disclosure requirements for real estate transactions for homes that are in. The sleevel rise exposure area.

The Office of Planning and Sustainable Development has done and is still conducting a series of studies on the feasibility, both economic and policy feasibility of implementing managed retreat or relocation away from the shoreline. And they are also currently working on response to another requirement from the Legislature, the sea level rise adaptation for state facilities.

There was an inventory of state facilities that are vulnerable to sea level rise and they're currently working on a tool to help state agencies do the assessment of their level of vulnerability.

This is an ongoing process where through the Climate Commission, reminding agencies of these recommendations that they can work into the work that they are doing to adapt to sea level rise and setting the benchmarks. One of the things I did want to mention is the 2017 report set the 3.2ft of sea level rise as the planning Benchmark.

And with four feet for critical infrastructure. The 2022 report increased that based on more recent scientific data to 4ft for all infrastructure and 6ft of planning for sea level rise for critical infrastructure. Currently our visualization tools still only allow for anyone to see the 3.2ft.

But there is ongoing work happening at the University to get to our next generation of modeling. And then finally what is the needed action? Well, we all need to keep moving towards those recommendations that were done across the across the state and county agencies.

One of the things that we did in the 2022 update to the report was identify some areas of unmet need and focus areas for the timeframe between 2023 and 2027 when the 10 year report is due.

And those are outlined there facilitating interagency coordination for holistic adaptation planning to ensure that we don't have state agencies and counties working at counter purposes where we can actually implement things that might reinforce the work that each other are doing. Conserving and adapting native Hawaiian cultural resources and sites.

Integrating equity and justice considerations into vulnerability assessments and adaptation planning and actions. Addressing and stopping the loss of shoreline access, which is something we hear a lot of from the public, of people losing access to the beaches, to public trust lands.

Integrating the valuation, economic valuation of our ecosystems and natural coastal resources into our planning and actions, seeing that those are resources that have an inherent value to us, making moving away from the shoreline a viable option.

Identifying funding mechanisms for adaptation and then implementing phased adaptation to sea level rise and achievement of meeting the recommendations in those focus areas can be achieved through adaptation pathway planning and the adaptation pathways, outlining that not every planning this has to be done on a regional basis which identifies that different adaptation actions are appropriate for different infrastructure and different locations.

So adaptation pathways would set out a variety of measures which would be implemented based on environmental or structural triggers as they occur.

So over time, you may go from adapting through floodproofing or elevation of a structure moving on over time to potentially identifying that that is a structure that needs to be relocated away from the coastal hazard and out of the shoreline.

And then the end point being restoration of a more natural State of the shoreline, which can help to provide those natural buffers, such as dunes and a more natural coastal morphology that will help to dissipate some of that wave energy.

So the idea of that is to recognize that not every place is correct for just immediately moving away from the shoreline, that we can take sequential actions over time. And that with that, if there's any questions, just a few pictures here of some different locations around the island and the impacts we're seeing of the coastal hazards.

The islands, of course, are eroding away anyway. Do we. Maybe it's not an important. Maybe it's not an important question, but do we know how much faster they're eroding away now that the climate change is really kicking in?

We do have measurements of the extent of how much sea levels have risen about a half a foot over the last century. About a half a foot over the last century. And so we know that, yes, islands naturally erode back to the sea, but that that is being made worse by sea level rise.

And to some extent we don't know.

How much what the factor is. We don't, but the.

I would say that regardless of the cause of the erosion or the cause of the hazards on the coast, they exist and we have infrastructure which is being threatened by them that can be addressed through adaptation.

I don't know if this is a question for you or Dr. Fletcher, but is the expansion of the ocean with increasing temperature. Is it logarithmic or is it linear?

I would say logarithmic.

I'm gonna let Chip come. It's not yet. Logarithmic is too steep.

Okay. Could you come up, please, just for the. Yeah.

Thank you. The projections for sea level rise project non linear rise. And the worst part of the. Or the. The fastest rate of rise will begin around mid century to the end of the century in very steep rates of rise of, you know, a foot per decade sort of thing.

Okay. Because I think you know where I'm going with the question. Are we seeing the start? So it's not really logarithmic, but you're thinking again, because you're modeling it as best you can, that we're going to see an acceleration. Absolutely.

Every model shows rapid acceleration. We're still in. We're at the very tip of the iceberg, so to speak. This is the very beginning of this.

Okay. All right. That's helpful. I appreciate that. Thank you.

If I might. The story about the islands eroding is largely from erosion down the watersheds and the peaks lowering the coastal erosion is due to either the islands subsiding, like the Big island is subsiding, Maui is subsiding, or the ocean rising.

And when you get both those on top of each other, it explains why Maui has the worst rates of erosion because the island itself is sinking and also the sea level is going up.

If I could just add. Sorry. One additional piece to that is we historically have developed very close to the shoreline. So as those processes are occurring, we have not left room for our shorelines to adapt to that because they can't migrate inland as they would in a more naturally balanced system.

Thank you, Amy.

Thank you.

Next object, invite Stuart Coleman, who's the Executive Director of VI and currently serves at the State Cesspool Conversion Working Group and on the advisory board of the University of Hawaii at Manoa Sea Grant Program. Stuart, come on down.

Every time I see you, Stuart, I just think crappy thoughts for some reason, and I'm not sure why.

I'm getting used to it. Yes. Becoming known as the Grand Poobah of wastewater. Good afternoon, Chair, Senators, we appreciate you holding this. And to the climate office, it's important to gather together and take stock of where we are.

I am here today to talk about an issue that, unlike some of the just super complex and wicked issues that some of the others are dealing with, this, I thought naively had a very reasonable timeline. And we could take care of this in a short amount of time because there are solutions.

Hawaii, as you both know well, has 83,000 cesspools that release 52 million gallons of untreated wastewater into our groundwater every single day. Now, to put that in perspective, the only place in the entire country that has more cesspools than Hawaii is another island, Long Island. But we have the most per capita in the country.

And this is like our worst sewage spill. If you guys remember 2006, when we had 48 million gallons of sewage discharged into the Ala Wai Canal and shut down Waikiki for a week, this is more than that every single day across the islands. So we're currently doing less than 200 cesspool conversions per year.

To meet the mandate under Act 125 to convert all cesspools by 2050, we're going to have to increase that to at least 3,000 a year. And so we need to implement policies and procedures that will allow that and technology to happen. Because again, we are, we were the last state to ban cesspools.

And we have the most, and we have the most to lose because of our over dependence on tourism. And so people do not want to come to a place that's known for having all these substandard sanitation systems. Estimated total cost is about 3 to 4 billion.

But when you measure that against the value of the reefs that are, studies have shown to be hundreds of millions in revenue every year. From tourism to fishing to diving and many recreational sports. Quickly go over the problem and then we are getting to solutions.

We have public health hazards, drinking water contamination, nitrate related issues like Blue Baby syndrome with elevated rates of nitrogen in the drinking water like we've seen in upcountry Maui, gastrointestinal issues and diseases. And then as Chip mentioned earlier, we have the highest rates of staph and MRSA infections in the entire country.

Two times the level of mrsa, four times the level of staph. And these are serious hazards. Just in my own neighborhood, for instance, we're starting a new program called C Sick where we document it.

We have four people that were hospitalized due to serious infections just from going in our local water that was contaminated, where we happen to have a lot of cesspools.

Environmental hazards include poor water quality, which affects locals and visitors alike, decreased fish populations, toxic algal blooms, invasive algae overgrowth which smothers our reefs and we lead to coral decline, coral reef disease. And this is not only an environmental hazard, but our coral reefs are.

These pose existential threats to us because they protect US from storms, flooding, hurricanes and tsunamis. So relating to climate change and sea level rise. As Chip mentioned earlier in his presentation, we're going to have see increased inundation of cesspools with sea level rising. We're already seeing this. He showed you the photo of the exposed cesspool.

We have number of photos of those across the state.

And where the houses fell into the ocean that Amy was talking about on the North Shore, there were just leaching waste directly into the water in what is argued one of the most valuable and well known strips of beach, that seven mile miracle where some of the greatest surfing contests in the world are held.

So these are issues that we need to deal with. Now here's the good news. We are working on five fronts to deal with these water quality issues. And one is through outreach and education. And this is where we have a bit of a silver lining.

We were able to bring in a Department of Labor grant for $1.0 million to do workforce development training. And then we just got an EPA grant for innovative workforce development training for $1.0 million from the EPA. These are green jobs. They will pay well and they're long term and very sustainable and very local.

So we can also do town hall meetings with, we've done a couple actually with Senator Richards and we do community outreach to just remind people and educate them about the issue. We are also working to bring innovative technology. So we work with the Gates foundation and we were able to get a National Sanitation foundation grant, phase one.

And then we just were approved for phase two funding to really develop new technology that would make Hawaii, we could go from last place, last state to convert cesspools to a leader. We could leapfrog past all the other states in doing new technology.

And part of that involves we have the ability right now, and we're trying this in malaya to recycle 100% of our waste. And so the water can be recycled and used for irrigation.

And so I wrote an article in Hawaii Business magazine that I shared with some of you where we would build green belts around areas that serve as windbreaks and fire breaks and then irrigate them with this treated wastewater.

And then as Susan Crow talked about, we can treat the solids instead of trucking them to landfills, which is the worst thing you could possibly do. You can actually get them to turn in through pyrolysis into biochar and that's a soil amendment and could really, we could use 100% these things.

And so we're doing policy and policy and advocacy like this, we have a number of bills that we're pushing forward financial resources to create loans for homeowners. That's going to be very important. And then pilot projects where we are showing this technology and these policies in place.

So these are the three top bills that we're been pushing for a number of years. And the first one is a new cesspool section at DoH. Nothing can happen on this issue until that happens. And so it's in the Governor's Budget.

It was one of the top recommendations of the Cesspool Conversion Working Group, which Ted Bolan and I served on for four years. And then we are also proposing a new testing center at the Water Resources Research center at uh, working with uh, SEA Grant to approve and create pathways for new and more affordable technologies.

And this is great because all we need to do is create a pilot project. It will pay for itself thereafter, the companies pay to do the testing. And so this is kind of reviving Roger Babcock's program that he had at uh, that kind of after he went to the city and County of Honolulu fell by the wayside.

And then we're also bringing back the successful program for rebates for homeowners for cesspool replacement under Act 153. That was very successful. Enough people signed up in the first week alone to drain the $5 million. So that shows you the demand is extremely high. And so we have community support for these bills.

And I'd open up for any questions that seems Shorter than the others. You went longer.

Yes, you did. Yep.

Wow. And all those graphs change. I know. Okay, apologies.

Yeah. Quick question. On your map, where you have the high, medium and Low priority? Yeah. You had Hilo listed as I think media or two or three. Or is your. Yeah. And yeah. You have a priority three. Didn't we discuss that? And isn't that bumped up now? Yeah. So it's an old map. It should be.

No, this is the current map. But we're in the process of build the past last year. We're updating the cesspool tool. And so we hope to show because the ones on upcountry Maui also show they went from priority one to priority three. And we're. That's not accurate either. Until we need to update those. Yeah.

How many in priority one? How many talking? You're saying 83,000 cesspools statewide. Yeah. How many are priority one cesspool, Ted? Do you have a number? 13,000. About 13. 13,000. So are you guys keeping score? In other words, are you tracking okay.

Every time one take care of one, you're increasing that amount so that we all know what's going on.

Yeah. It has been such a snail's pace, to tell you the truth. There's been transitions at the Department of Health and the wastewater branch and that's why if we can get this successful section approved, which again will pay for itself, because part of their job will be bringing in federal money to help homeowners.

And there is plenty of federal money for that. So these will pay for themselves and then we will really be able to move because right now we're doing under 200. So it's just not making much of a difference. But we can accelerate that.

Yeah, because I'm thinking about neighborhood boards and community and they keeping track. Yeah. How you doing, Coppola? And how you doing out there? I like it. We can have competitions. Exactly, exactly.

No, because I'm afraid that Big Island's going to win in your dream. They have over half of them, so. Yeah, they've got a big. We got the 50,000. I mean, we're going to win as far as having the worst on that. 12,13,000. How many are on the Big Island? Because it's our coastal ones that high priority.

Yeah. Is it most of that or is it spread across the state?

You know, that's a good question of the priority one. You know, I would think at least a third to half, but I can get you those numbers.

Yeah, I'd like to see it because again, it's a financing thing. Yeah. I don't think anybody's disarmed disagreeing with it. Right. It's a financing in the near shore waters. Thereby the coastal ones are the highest priority. Right. Which makes sense. Yeah, but okay, thanks. Thank you, Stuart. Mahalo.

Mahalo, Stuart. Next, I'd like to invite Monique Schaefer. Monique leads HSEO's economy wide decarbonization efforts and analyzes the pathways, policies and actions needed to achieve Hawaii's net negative greenhouse gas emissions target. And recommendations, state policies and programs to support these actions. Welcome, Monique.

Thank you.

All right, thanks, Leah. Aloha Chair, Vice Chair, Senator Lodes. Malik Schaefer Decarbonization Program Manager for the Hawaii State Energy Office. As you know, last year we published our Act 238 decarbonization report. It included a plethora of modeling and also 31 concrete actions and recommendations.

We are continuing to actively track the recommendations and where they're at and we're refining them and making progress on them. We have five Legislative proposals that we submitted as bills this year. I will cover that later in the presentation. All of these proposals reflect decarbonization report findings and recommendations.

We continue to make progress on many of the action items. Energy efficiency, if you remember from the report, it was the most cost effective measure. And implementing energy efficiency throughout state buildings, encouraging it in residences and commercial buildings is by far the most effective way to reduce emissions because it reduces our energy demand.

It means we have to build out less generation and burn less fuels. And then I also will provide some federal funding updates. Our office has been really grateful and blessed to have a lot of the Ira and IIJA funds come towards us.

But it's a blessing and a curse because we have had a lot of work to process. So the legislative proposals this year from the energy office, we are really wanting to get the long storage, long duration storage Bill passed.

This Bill is really centered around identifying hydropower pump storage, hydropower locations as well as other sites for long duration clean energy storage technologies. We are at a point where we have to make sure we can store the energy that is generated, the clean energy that's generated.

Because a lot of what we generate today is solar which is intermittent and only during the day. So you have to store it in order to have sort of the long term benefits and the grid service associated with that. We're also looking at a Belkler statewide slim hole well drilling.

This is really just resource characterization to understand where we might have geothermal energy. So you know we are working with uh, their Groundwater Modeling Group, Dr. Lao Tze's group to really do some of that, the first phases of that.

But without an understanding of our geology and where the heat is, it's really hard to have any development on geothermal. There is an EIIRP or an Energy Information Reporting Program Bill we are supporting. We really see this as a housekeeping Bill.

But it's critical because it allows both hi EMA and the Office of Homeland Security our energy industry reports or statements which allows them to respond faster to emergencies and disasters which we know we're going to see more of with a changing climate. We have some amendments to the rps.

These really are centered around strengthening the RPS and the renewable and energy climate goals. And it's really to address emerging trends. So it's attaching some carbon intensity requirements for some of the combustion type energy projects that still classify as renewable. And then the last one is amendments to 225p. That is our clean economy target.

That is really what is our guiding light for tracking Emissions reductions. Our amendments here are really setting sector specific greenhouse gas targets. It's establishing a total emissions target. So right now our target is a net emissions target. So in addition to the net emissions target, it's a total target to avoid overuse of offsets.

And then it also clarifies the applicability of the law. So a lot of industry folks frequently say, well that's the state, that's what the state's doing. This added language says, no, it's statewide. So it's inclusive of all business activities. It's an economy wide target, as is the Paris agreement and our nationally determined contributions. So spotlight on efficiency.

We have a plethora again of things we're working on. But because efficiency is such a critical component of reducing demand and reducing emissions, we wanted to give a big Update. So effective January 6th, just last week we did work with Dags to release our pre qualified energy service contracting list. And this is actually really important.

So it's a state building energy use. It allows us to, you know, do energy savings performance contracts, which are a really cost effective way to get. Inefficient. Lighting replaced with LEDs, H vac systems, different sort of necessary actions for state buildings to lead by example.

And then you know, the folks that make it, the contractors that make it on these lists, they're all vetted so they don't have to go through the full state procurement process if you want to use those lists. So state agencies in the room use this.

And again, these are some benefits of the ESCO list or the energy savings performance contracts that ESCOs do. So you know, it really allows for facilitating market transport transformation. These ESCOs, it's competitive to get on these lists. It's cost effective procurement. Talk to any state agency. It takes up a lot of time.

So if you can reduce procurement time, that's a win and you're allowed to choose. Lastly, I did want to give seven minutes, goes really fast, an overview of some of our federal funding. So over the last couple of years through Aira and Iija, the office has sought after about $150 million in funds. And that is broad brushstroke.

So a lot of different things under there. We have grid forming technologies that we're working with KIUC on developing. We have a home energy efficiency rebates program that we'll be launching soon, probably later this year, looking at assistance for the latest zero energy building code.

So again, energy efficiency, and I'm almost done, the Diesel Emissions Reduction act, to name just a few of the many funds so thank you. I can take questions and then of course you can send questions to our office. Our Chief Energy Officer also wanted me to offer. We have an alternative fuels report coming out.

It's going to be a big one and we are more than happy to brief any of you folks on that when that's released.

Any questions?

Maybe I missed the slim hole. Drilling. What is that?

Yeah, so that's resource characterization. So that is drilling, just investigating. So you're not doing any geothermal activities whatsoever. It's really just drilling to see if there's heat.

So it's exploratory.

Exploratory. And we are doing that in lockstep with community Members. So there's a lot of community outreach. We haven't chosen any location to poke holes yet.

Thank you.

Next, I'd like to invite Laura Kaakua and Derek Takanu to come and speak on some updates of the Navajine case.

Aloha Chair and Senators Laura Kaakua, Climate and Culture Manager at Hawaii Department of Transportation.

I'm Derek Takeo. I'm on the Youth Transportation Council and I am also a student at uhmc.

And we'll hear, we're very excited about our new Hawaii Youth Transportation Council. So we'll make sure to save. I'll go as quickly as I can through our slides and make sure to save time for Derek later on in our presentation. So just some quick updates. This is an overview slide. What we're doing to address climate change.

It includes both adaptation. So we're doing long term planning for sea level rise and other climate hazards across all of our modes, highways, airports and harbors. We're working right now on our greenhouse gas reduction plan.

We actually have partners and consultants in town this week to meet with partners and work across all modes on the most effective strategies to meet the legislative mandates as well as the Navajine settlement agreement mandates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across all of our modes of transportation and actually across the whole sector as well.

We're converting our fleets to EV vehicles or cleaner fuels, installing public charging. The list kind of goes on. Exploring Low carbon materials. We have some exciting pilot projects at Honolulu harbor with some federal funding for hydrogen field, cargo handling equipment and power plant and accrediting all of the big five airports to airport carbon accreditation level three.

We're also in our third category, increasing our transportation choices and safety. So part of our commitment in the Navahine settlement is to build out our pedestrian, bike and transit network. We're doing that in partnership with the counties we have A five year time limit to build out our most critical gaps in our network.

A lot of that is going to be done around school zones. So making sure that kids have safe pathways to walk to school and don't always need to be driven by their parents. And it's a vision zero approach to traffic safety.

And then some of our more, I guess, innovative work, new updates for you are really looking at prioritizing our vulnerable, most vulnerable communities and how we're prioritizing our projects.

We're developing a Native Hawaiian consultation protocol to improve how we consult with Native Hawaiian communities and local communities on all of our projects, supporting our youth council and later on in the year working with partners in the environmental sector on an education campaign to support our reduced emissions.

These are, I'm not going to read this, but just this is a slide just to say that our Navahimi settlement agreement commitments. So the settlement was announced in June. It's been about six or seven months since then. Pages and pages of commitments were made and we're working very urgently across all modes on them.

Something that we can all be proud of as a state is our leadership in the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program. So we installed public EV charging stations last year at Kahului park and right on Maui and Aloha Tower Marketplace and have multiple stations, public EV charging stations, planned for the rest of this year on many islands.

And really equity and delivery of benefits to disadvantaged communities is the starting place for where we're installing these public EV charging stations. Okay. One morning. So much to share. We have a new Office of Climate and Culture. We're working with the counties I mentioned on this completed bike, pedestrian and transit network.

And maybe I'll just, I'll note here before switching over to Derek in our budget request this year we have about 40 million in bicycle and pedestrian projects and plan updates and another 40 million actually in projects that will help pedestrian safety, such as traffic signaling and including bicycle lanes on bridge replacement projects.

So our really exciting new development is our Hawaii Youth Transportation Council formed to advise hawaii.on our climate mitigation work. So I'll hand it over to Derek.

So as I said earlier, I'm a student at uhmc. I'm studying sustainability. I am also a part time teacher at Maui High School. So I start with a story of how I got here. So when I was younger I used to want to be a scientist because I wanted to solve climate change.

But I was in elementary school at the time and I was under the assumption that it would be solved by society and the world leadership by the time I graduated with a degree. So in about two years from now, obviously that did not end up being the case.

And I did eventually switch my engineering back from switch my major from engineering to now sustainability. And I want to say that first I think that climate change will. Since climate change requires more than just our State of Hawaii, it is very important that we be a leader and we work through lobbying and setting an example.

And I feel that this is something that Hawaii has done well as we were the first state to have a net zero target by 2045. We also lead the world or lead the country in the least amount of energy use per capita. I remember you had a question about that.

So the energy use per capita in the globe has gone up and that's mostly due to countries like India and China industrializing and therefore they're using more energy. And then energy use in the United States has remained relatively constant or has gone down since 2000 per capita. Yes.

And another thing I wanted so a lot of policies and the nationwide policies tend like are food subsidies programs. They tend to subsidize the foods that are the worst for the environment and worst for our health.

So like corn for example, is mostly used to create food food products like high food, just corn syrup that have led to obesity and diabetes, particularly amongst the Low income people who do not who cannot afford healthy food.

And it also leads to being used for feedstock for mass CFOs, concentrated feeding operations which are also terrible for the environment.

And that's one of the things that do like lobbying with the federal and we're working to the Federal Government and also on the state level by trying to introduce food subsidies for fruits and vegetables for healthier foods, we can try to improve our health and our sustainability at the same time.

And yeah, maybe we'll just stop there.

Okay, any questions? Thank you very much, Laura and Durr.

Thank you.

Next we're having Kiana Otsuka and I'll let her introduce herself.

Aloha. My name is Kiana Otsuka and I'm the senior transportation planner at the Oahu Metropolitan Planning Organization. And today I want to kind of build on Laura's presentation about our ground transportation sector. So first I want to sort of call your attention to the top chart. That's our transportation emissions by sector.

Our ground transportation is that dark green bar at the bottom. So you'll see that ground transportation is our second largest portion of our transportation sector emissions. And the majority of those emissions come from light duty vehicles. So light duty vehicles are our personal cars that we're driving every day.

So we really want to help focus on how we can reduce our emissions from our light duty vehicles. The chart on the bottom is what's called our vehicle miles traveled. So it's something, it just represents the amount that we're driving.

And this is a really good proxy for the energy we consume as part of the ground transportation sector. It considers things like electric vehicles, but that still require, again, energy. So our vehicle miles traveled has been increasing. But I do want to point out that our vehicle miles traveled per capita or per person is remaining relatively stable.

But our population is growing, which means we also have more vehicles on the road, which means we're also consuming more energy while we're driving more. I did want to give you a statistic that per day people in Hawaii drive enough miles to make 65 round trips to the moon.

And this is about 14.4 billion miles traveled last year. Some ongoing work that we're doing. I want to point out to you the picture on the left is the COVID for the Investing and Transportation Choices Toolkit.

That's a document put together by the state Climate Commission that helps inform decision makers, the community, other government staff on what key steps we can take to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in the ground transportation sector. And so these three actions below are sort of aligned with some key next steps.

The first is outreach on our existing electric bike and electric moped rebate. So unfortunately, haven't had a really high participation in the rebate. And we wanted to know why as well as understand or as well as tell people that the rebate exists.

So the existing rebate eligibility includes those who are eligible for Low income programs such as SNAP and Section 8 housing vouchers, students and those without vehicles. So when we asked folks why they weren't participating in the rebate program, one of the top three reasons was because the cost.

So even with the existing rebate, electric bikes and electric mopeds were still too costly, sort of with Laura's work. The other one was lack of safe infrastructure so folks don't feel safe biking around.

The second was our office just is working on completing our state employee transportation demand management study where we engage state employees about how they get to work, why and what would incentivize them to get to work using more active and shared modes of transportation.

This built on legislation that has been introduced in the past, including one by Senator Rhodes, as well as a House Resolution last year that asked us to study this.

And finally, the Safe Routes to School Advisory Committee has Been meeting periodically over the last year to develop recommendations for how to make it safer for students to apply bike and walk to school. So our key actions that the Ledge can take in this upcoming session is one, to expand the electric bike and electric moped rebate.

So the three bullet points below represent what our rebate could look like to match that of Denver, Colorado. So I had the privilege of speaking to some folks about their rebate and I want to share some statistics with you about the success of their program that I find really heartwarming.

So they gave folks electric bike rebates and also asked them to take a survey about how their travel behavior has changed. So those with the voucher rode their bike on average 26 miles per week. Sorry. And replacing 3.4 car round trips, which represents 100,000 miles, vehicle miles traveled each week reduced, which is amazing.

And they also provided additional rebate monies to folks who were income constrained and they rode their bikes 50% more than the average voucher recipient. Two is to Fund a more robust state government employee transportation benefits program. The three recommendations there represent what we heard from state employees. What would incentivize them the most to choose or. Sorry.

Change how to get to work if they are driving alum to work. I'll just share with you that if just 10% of state employees who currently drive alone to work, change how they get to work.

So they walk, bike, take transit, carpool, Vanpool, et cetera, there's the potential for us to reduce vehicle miles traveled by 93,000 miles per workday. So it doesn't necessarily need to mean every day people choose a different mode, but it could be some, you know, more employees maybe once a week.

And my last recommendation is around the safe thoughts to school. So one is to increase funding and then two is to give budget authority to HDOT to expend those funds. And this will reflect recommendations in their annual report on infrastructure projects to improve safety. That's all. Sorry. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Keanu. Questions? Yep.

Could you go over that number again? You said reduction of 4 or drove 4 billion miles statewide? Yeah.

It's 14.4 billion miles in one year for all Hawaii residents.

14.4 billion. And who came up with that number? Where did that number come from?

Yeah, that. That data is from the DBED Data book for 2023.

Right. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. And we are at one o'clock. But I... Unless we get kicked out of the room, I'm willing to go ahead and finish. We have two more speakers.

Yes, Correct. Mahalo. Thank you. I'd like to invite Kainan Miranda and Melissa Pavlicek for representing Care for Aina Now to talk about the environmental stewardship fee.

Aloha. Thank you for having us.

Aloha, Chairman Gabbard, Vice Chair Richards, and Senator Rhoads. Mahalo for inviting us today to talk about Care for Aina Now's proposal for an environmental stewardship fee. Care for Aina Now is a coalition of over 40 organizations with representation from environmental nonprofits, community organizations, Native Hawaiian organizations, small businesses, and others. My name is Kainan Miranda.

I'm the director of external affairs for the Nature Conservancy Hawaii in Palmyra. And with me is Melissa Pavlicek. She's our coalition's core coordinator for the year. As members of the community, scientists, biocultural practitioners, and natural resource managers, our coalition has seen the effect that chronic underinvestment in our Aina has had throughout Hawaii. In the face of increasing impacts from climate change, from the long term stressors like sea level rise to the short term catastrophic shocks like wildfire and devastating storms.

We know as a coalition that investing in Aina is one of the best and most efficient ways we can protect our community, economic livelihoods, and unique natural and cultural resources. We know that our healthy ecosystem are functioning ecosystems and those can serve as nature based solutions to build community resilience in the face of climate change.

For example, we know the coral reefs can absorb up to 97% of wave energy to help reduce erosion on our coastal communities. Native forests are critical to the recharge of our aquifers, can help reduce flood and landslide risk through building strong soil retention health, and reduce sediment waste moving towards our near shore communities. And that adequate management of our lands can help reduce fire risk through reducing fuel loads and other risks.

You'll hear so much, and you have already today about the risks, the dangers, the harms, and some of the alarming information that you've been presented. And we're here today to really talk about some paths forward and some solutions.

So as you might know, our coalition and our proposal for an environmental stewardship fee isn't a new one. It's been going through the state Legislature for several years now. But we have some exciting updates to share about some recent research that we've done as a coalition and some polling as well.

So in December, our coalition helped update a, commission updated technical report on the natural resource financing throughout the state. And in that report we found a conservative estimate of the annual gap between estimated natural resource management needs versus expenditures to be about $560 million a year.

Looking at some other measures that could move upwards of over a billion dollars a year. And we'd be happy to kind of walk through that financing report at some other time. In addition, we've, an updated poll showed that 80% of Hawaii voters believe that state government programs are critical to protecting natural resources from Mauka to Makai and are critical to mitigating risks in our communities from wildfires and floods. And finally, the Governor's Climate Advisory Team in their January report recommended environmental stewardship fee as a potential funding mechanism to build resilience throughout the state.

These are some really big numbers, but there's a huge stark contrast between doing good land management, and it's not a difference between doing good land management and bad land management. It's a stark contrast between doing land management at all. So a lot of the work that is currently being done by DLNR and others is through community based organizations. And we really want to raise our voices and advocate for more funding to close this gap.

So to provide an overview of our proposed recommendations, we recommend really a few key policy elements. The first is that we should create a $50 annual license for the use of lands governed by the Department of Land and Natural Resources for visitors over the age of 15.

The second is that we should create a stewardship commission to direct the spending of those revenues collected by the fee. The commission should have a cross representation of all sectors, including state agencies like DLNR, the Office of Planning and Sustainable Development, and the Hawaii Tourism Authority.

And it should also have experts in Native Hawaiian cultural practice and restoration, scientists, nonprofits versed in environmental restoration, and community organizations themselves. And finally, we believe that revenues from the fee should be dedicated for the purposes that are collected for long term. It's important to have a consistent permanent funding source so that way we can make sure that Aina is adequately managed year in, year out. Having shocks and that management can be really detrimental to long term efforts.

And lastly, we also believe that 25 to 50% of those revenues should be implemented as grants directly to community partners and other organizations beyond just the state agencies in charge. And that any revenues collected should also include the appropriate amount designated through Public Land Trust revenues for OHA.

Many of the advocates and the community based organizations will be with us here tomorrow when you have your opening day. And it's been a while since I've been under 18, but we have 60 middle schoolers joining us on Friday. So we'll definitely come and have them share this message with you themselves.

And we're happy to take any questions you folks might have.

Questions? Yeah, I don't get it, quite frankly. You said 80% of the voters are okay with this and just not an official poll, but I've been talking with tourists who come here, whether family or non-family members, and there's this thing, it's a no brainer. All these people, you had 10 million tourists in 2019, before the pandemic. They all want... This is paradise. Hell yeah, we want to contribute. So hopefully this year.

Sadly, the natural disasters, fires, floods and other climate shocks are really raising our awareness about what that gap is. And so finding those resources to make sure that we mitigate it, prevent it, and really focus on investing in our natural and cultural environment. Very important.

Thank you very much.

And last but definitely not least, we have Paul Bernstein. He's a UHERO researcher coming to talk to us about Carbon Cashback.

So I appreciate coming last year and giving the chance to tie things together and provide us solutions and not request any money. So you should be happy with that. So mahalo, Leah, the Climate Change Commission. Mahalo, Senator Gabbard, for holding this informational briefing. Mahalo to you, Senator Richards, Senator Rhoads.

So, as Leah said, I'm here to speak about Carbon Cash Back, which simply places a fee on carbon pollution returns the monies back to Hawaii households. So as I said, requires no money from anybody or no money from the government. So in terms of the issue, Dr. Fletcher talked about this. I have a figure just for Hawaii itself, and we've heard about this, that we have this target in 2030 to have our emissions down to 50% below 2005 levels and get to net zero by 2045.

The blue line is a projection from a UHERO analysis done on behalf of the Department of Health of where our emissions are projected to go under current set of policies. And the orange line you can think of as the target where we need to hit. And you can see there's a sizable gap there.

So let me propose one policy that could help us shrink that gap and that is Carbon Cashback. So as I said, it's simply placing a fee on fossil fuels. We could take advantage of the existing government infrastructure and just put an adder, a fee adder, on the existing barrel tax.

The policy we've put forward in the past would put an additional 5 cents a gallon on imported fuels in the first year. So basically $6 a metric ton of CO2, increasing by 5 cents the next year, then another 10 cents for this succeeding 10 years, getting us up to about 90 cents a gallon of fuel after 10 years.

As I said, all that revenue would be collected and then it would simply go out via a refundable tax credit. And the reason for using a refundable tax credit mechanism is everybody would get the revenues, and it would go out in equal shares. It doesn't matter how much you make, it is refundable.

If you have no income, that's fine, you just simply file the tax return and there you're automatically eligible for that funding. In terms of why many economists, and I personally, really like the policy. Here's a number of benefits that we see from this policy. And this has come from the conclusion of two UHERO studies that were done. The first one, actually thanks to you folks in the Legislature commissioning this study, to look at what the economic impacts would be if Hawaii implemented a policy such as this.

And basically we find the policy to be effective in that its number one goal, it reduces emissions. And reduces cumulative emissions by 10% over basically a 20 year time horizon. And putting that into a number that's more meaningful to folks, that's like taking 400,000 vehicles off the road. So that gets at the Department of Transportation.

So would help with that in terms of the Navahine settlement. As I mentioned, all the money goes back in equal shares. So this becomes a very progressive policy, which the figure the right is demonstrating. So the black bars there in that figure show the share of the revenues that would be paid by quintiles or each household group, where the lowest quintile is on the left, Q1, going up to the highest quintile, Q5. And we also have the visitors because they're going to be paying this fee.

So if you look at the black bars, you can see that it's going up in share, meaning that the lowest income quintile is paying the least and the highest income quintile is paying the most. And the visitors are paying roughly about as much share as the high income.

So the visitors and the highest income are paying about 50% of these revenues. But then if you look at the green bar, everybody gets the same and the visitors get nothing. If you compare the black and the green bar, that gives you an idea of who's better off and who's worse off.

You see the lowest income quintile is the best off. Highest income quintile actually loses a bit. But I don't think we should get broken hearted about that. The policy is also very efficient. It allows households and businesses to do as they please to reduce their emissions. Right. So nobody's prescribing what should be done.

They can choose what is economically best for them. Business A may have much better ideas than for what they can do. Sorry. They're ideas for Business A that fit them. They're ideas for Business B. Just like Household A and Household B, different methods. Last, as I mentioned, visitors pay the fee. They don't receive anything. It will not grow government. All the monies that come in, the monies that go out, minus a small administrative fee for Department of Taxation. And studies have shown that this has minimal impact on the overall economy. Mahalo for your time.

Thank you. Any questions? Senator Rhoads.

So it's a complicated topic, so it's hard to know where to start. But can we start sort of with first principles? So if I'm understanding it correctly, when we pay for oil, when we put... I don't own a car, so I still drive. So when I put gas in my car, I'm paying for oil.

But oil, well, A, it's subsidized by the tax code, if I'm not mistaken. So there's a subsidy to start with. But then also the, all the damage that is caused by using oil, all the damage that it does, is not reflected in the price. And so what that means is that we're basically borrowing money from Mother Nature. Is that a fair way to look at it?

I'd say that's fair. As you're saying, we're not experiencing the full cost of that good.

We're paying less than what we should pay.

We're over consuming it. Right. The reason we're over consuming, we have too much fossil fuels. I would argue the main reason is the price.

Okay, so if the price goes up, we'll use less fossil fuel. And that's the whole point of the legislation and the whole point of the... But there's still sort of this, what's the word I'm looking for? This sort of sense of magic. Like if you take this money from the public and then you just give it back to them, it still works. Can you explain a little more why that's true?

Sure. So people are paying over time with this. They're seeing a price of gasoline and they're paying that over time, they get this money back in a lump sum. So people are going to make their decisions with that lump sum of money based on how those prices have changed. Right.

Just because, say you want to, you consume a lot of soda. Right. Versus, well, let's go soda versus water or something. And if you get that, if the tax is placed on soda, presumably you're going to switch to the water, which is less expensive relative to the soda. Even though you're given all that money back. Right.

You're still going to try to avoid.

Right. You're going to try to avoid. You're trying to use your money to maximize your welfare, your consumption. Right. You're not just going to automatically take that money and pay for the higher price good.

Okay, so, but across the, amongst economists, pretty much economists of all stripes agree that this is one of the most effective tools for reducing carbon consumption.

3,600 economists signed a letter saying exactly to that effect.

Nobel Laureates.

Exactly. Four former chubs, former Fed chairs. Sorry. And, right.

Okay. All right, thanks.

So, Paul, where in the country is this being done, number one? Or where in the world is this being done successfully?

So I would say it's, there are different types of programs. But carbon pricing, let me just stick with carbon pricing. We'll get into the differences of different types. So California has a program. Washington state has a program. California has certainly helped it reduce its emissions. California's emissions have actually gone down over time.

It is applied all over Europe and the European Union and is shown to reduce their emissions. And also that's where you see the analysis of it not really hurting the economy. A policy that is most closely aligned with the one I'm talking about is in British Columbia. It has been shown to, again, to reduce emissions there. So there have been economic analyses. I'll also argue that. I'll also just point out that I don't have it at my fingertips. There was a study done to look at all different environmental policies, what have been effective at reducing emissions.

And the study found that carbon pricing was effective, but not only that, carbon pricing helped other policies be affected. So it's a, it's an and policy, if you will. Right. That you can imagine it being. It helps the RPS be more effective. Right. Because now the utilities have an additional incentive to reduce their use of fossil fuel. It has the incentive to be more energy efficient. Right. Because now the cost of fossil energy rises. You want to be more energy efficient, it's now more valuable to you to buy these energy efficient technologies.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, so I'm going to guess that the fifth quintile is the Big Island because we drive the furthest there. So explain that one to me because we talk about the equity, I'm sure, and I'll get a number for it. The average miles driven per employee is substantially higher on the Big Island. Which if it's a flat return, the problem is you can be putting some of our families underwater, and we have the highest food insecure population on the Big Island statewide.

So though I don't disagree with some of the principles, that's assuming you can convert and go with mass transit or something like that, but that's not available. So I think the argument about water versus soda, I get it. I don't disagree because you have a choice. But in this situation we don't have a choice. It's either get to your job or not get to your job. So what is the answer? Because I think in order for this to work for the geographically huge areas, my district alone is three Oahus. So how do we address that to keep it equitable?

So let me just first clarify because I obviously wasn't clear. Those quintiles are income quintiles. So the Big Island residents are spread across those five quintiles. Just to be clear. So the, I guess I have a few responses. One is the Ulupono study found that many of these high mileage drivers that you're talking about on all the islands actually are, a lot of them are actually doing business.

And so what they found is if they would convert, many of them, if they would convert to an electric vehicle, they would actually save money regardless of this policy. Right. So I would say that that is one option is to move over to an electric vehicle. It would actually, like I said, save them money.

And so in terms of policies, I think that's an information one to make people aware that the electric vehicles can save them money under certain circumstances and helping as, sorry, drawing a blank on which organization showed it. But continuing, as you folks have done, supporting the rollout of the charging infrastructure, I think that's incredibly important. I think the idea of increasing the busing not just on the Big Island but on Oahu. Go back to what you said Senator Gabbard, about watching all the people sitting in traffic. Right.

So I think there are complementary policies to work with this. Because you are, I agree with you, that people need alternative, that will make... People need alternatives. It'll make the policy less expensive to them. Right. Going back to my water versus soda. Right. The smaller that price difference is, the easier it is on people. So the easier it is to ride the bus or to get an electric vehicle or what have you. So that would be my...

Yeah, I'd like to see your data because I don't think it's there for large geography with low population. We're seeing the same problems with wastewater management. We don't have the usage per linear foot or mile, however I measure it. So it doesn't justify this cesspool or, excuse me, wastewater systems. And that's the problem with the mass transit. We don't have a population to fill an hourly bus, so we'll maybe run it twice a day, which doesn't address the work schedule. So I'd like to see the data that you have. I appreciate that. Thanks, Chair.

Can I follow up on that? So, I mean, just looking at, maybe I'm wrong, but if... My understanding is that if when you break it down by income, the people at the bottom of the income, no matter how many miles they're driving, they're going to get more money back than they would have...

That's not quite so. Basically it's if they were to drive, I think we worked it out, if they were to drive 70 miles a day, they would still get more money back. So I recognize that doesn't cover...

It's not even halfway.

But isn't there, I mean, the people on the Big Island. Sorry, I'm talking to both of you at this point, I guess, but the people on the Big Island are going to drive the extra miles anyway, so they're paying more right now than all the rest of us. So that's why I'm trying to figure out relative... You're saying then that if it's a really long commute, then eventually you don't get as much back to cover the difference. Okay.

I think that's the problem.

Thank you very much. Leah, closing remarks.

I just wanted to bid aloha, mahalo, to all our speakers today and of course to you, Senator Gabbard, for hosting us. And your team for helping us put together and especially to Natalie here who did all the heavy lifting. So mahalo, Natalie.

And I would like to end with saying mahalo to the Climate Change Commission and also to Leah. And I hope that today's briefing gives us a clear picture of what's ahead for our state and our people in the future regarding climate, Malama, and Laulima. That's it.