Climate Resilience
The climate crisis is the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced, it is critical to take climate mitigation and adaptation to heart through policy action. The reality is that the threat of a catastrophic natural disaster is becoming more real each year. In the case of a large hurricane, up to 65 percent of our current residential housing stock is projected to be destroyed or severely damaged. But climate change also impacts our freshwater supply, public health due to heatwaves, erosion impacts our shores and our aquifers; the list goes on.
According to the UN's scientific experts, the world must cut climate-polluting emissions to 45 percent below 2010 levels by 2030—and by 2050 it must reduce them to zero.
The latest climate science consensus informs us that in addition to accelerating the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and moving rapidly to 100% clean energy we must simultaneously draw down large amounts of built up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and deploy climate adaptation measures to protect the human and natural environment. To avoid intolerable climate impacts we must restrict global warming of 1.5°C average global temperature increase, and that requires major efforts to draw down carbon dioxide levels below 350 ppm.
To do that, we'll need to, among other things, stop burning coal and natural gas, leave fossil fuel reserves in the ground, protect our forests and our soil, aggressively develop renewable energy sources, and electrify our transportation sector. It's a heavy list, but not impossible.
Resources
Sea Level Rise
Read more from the Hawai‘i Climate Change Mitigation & Adaptation Commission created the Sea Level Rise Vulnerability & Adaptation Report in 2017. It is a comprehensive 304-page-long description of where Hawai‘i is today and where we will be in the future as sea level rise (SLR) increases with global warming. Read it here.
Clean Energy Economy
For O‘ahu to thrive and become a more sustainable island community, we need to be 100% fossil fuel free. In order to do that, we need to know what our collective emissions are. The City completed its first GHG inventory for calendar years 2005, 2015, and 2016 in the fall of 2018. A GHG Inventory is an accounting of the annual total amount of carbon pollution emissions by sector and source in our island economy, and serves as a benchmark to reduce our emissions each year moving forward. The GHG Inventory is also used to identify the largest sources of emissions so we can set island-specific carbon reduction targets and pinpoint clear strategies to achieve those goals.
Community Cohesion + Equity
Equity-based programs designed to address loss and damage due to climate change are needed now more than ever to avoid mass starvation, climate migration, water wars, and inundation due to sea level rise on our island and low-lying coastlines.
Learn more on the City and County’s Climate Action Plan.
Carbon Neutrality Challenge
The systems that we currently operate within are still fossil fuel dependent and emitting carbon every minute. Our mission is to fight for systemic change to save the planet, and we won’t ever stop!
But in the meantime, there are ways that we can address carbon emissions in our daily lives. Because the ultimate solution to climate change is carbon neutrality: when our CO2 emissions are equal to the emissions removed. That takes everyone pitching in.
UH Mānoa professors, students and community members gave us a start with the Carbon Neutrality Challenge. The premise is to calculate how much CO2 you generate, estimate the number of trees necessary to sequester those emissions, plant the trees, and then climate change solved!. Start the challenge today!
Sierra Club’s Task Force
In April 2018 Sierra Club’s Board of Directors authorized the establishment of a Climate Adaptation Task Force to conduct a landscape analysis for the Sierra Club and report recommendations back to the Board. For purposes of this study, “climate adaptation” and the scope of their investigation was defined to include measures needed to adapt to a climate-changed world, i.e adaptation measures to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
If you are curious to learn more on climate adaptation on a national scale, you can look at national Sierra Club’s report Climate Change: Adapting to a changed world, while reversing global warming to protect communities & ecosystems and promote climate justice