PUHI — Global sea levels are rising and scientists around the world are calling for already troubled coastal and low-lying areas to get worse before they get better.
In preparation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Services Center has developed an online teaching and planning tool that allows users to visualize the potential impacts.
Dolan Eversole of the University of Hawaii Sea Grant program said Hawaii must plan ahead, develop adaptation strategies and take a “no-regrets” approach.
“These are things that we should be doing for hazard mitigation if not for climate change,” he said. “You can’t separate climate change impacts from hazard impacts because they are so closely related.”
On Friday afternoon, Eversole and Ben Reder of the Pacific Services Center led a public session at Kauai Community College on “Sea-level Change and Coastal Flooding Impacts: A Briefing on New Products and Tools.” Approximately 20 people — including local biologists, concerned residents and even a few visitors — attended the event.
In Hawaii, sea level has risen over the last century at rates varying from 0.5 to 1.3 inches per decade. Those rates are projected to continue to accelerate, resulting in approximately a 1- to 3-foot rise or more by the end of the century.
The good news, Eversole said, is there is still time to address the problem, as climate hazards are only slowly emerging.
“We are starting to see impacts, but it’s not severe yet,” he said. “So we do have time. Not only are you an advantage here on this island because you have more ability to adapt and make progressive policies, but we have arguably a decade, or two or three, to really get things in place in preparation for this.”
Historically, Eversole said it usually takes “three strikes” — coastal disasters — before a community decides to take action. In Hilo, for example, there were two tsunamis and a minor event before the city retreated from the coast.
Chuck Blay, a local geologist who attended the event, said most people understand how different one Hawaiian island is from another and that he appreciated NOAA and UH Sea Grant bringing the event to Kauai.
“We can’t really have one policy that applies to all (islands),” he said. “However, I’m really glad you’re coming over and talking to everybody on Kauai because we’ve got Honolulu to scare the crap out of us, right?”
Unlike Oahu, Kauai is at an advantage by its lack of development, according to Blay.
“We have kind of a chance to get ahead of the curve by not getting to that point,” he said. “We can adjust better here. So it’s really helpful for us, our policy makers, to see what could happen.”
Reder walked the audience through NOAA’s Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts Viewer, showing what would happen if sea levels rose between 1 and 6 feet in places like Hanalei, Lihue and Honolulu.
It’s all aimed at kicking off climate adaptation conversations.
“What this tool does is just, on a national level, it gives you the data and the capability to just get a preliminary look at what could be the top-level impact from sea level rise,” Reder said.
Eversole discussed a range of sea level rise estimates from a number of sources, including NOAA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“The bottom line is there’s not any single number that everybody agrees on for sea level rise,” he said, adding that a “conservative middle point” is somewhere around 3 feet by 2100.
To date, there is no state mandate in Hawaii that requires planners to consider sea level rise. Instead, Eversole said state law says that all state and county agencies “shall consider climate change” in their plans and policies.
While encouraging, he maintains nobody knows what that means.
“Eventually we’ll come to some agreement on how to deal with this type of information,” he said. “Clearly we need to move towards having some acceptable standard that people can start to plan for.”
NOAA’s Sea Level Rise and Coastal Impacts Viewer can be accessed at www.csc.noaa.gov.slr.
• Chris D’Angelo, environmental reporter, can be reached at 245-0441 or cdangelo@thegardenisland.com.
