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Hawaii has been a leader on many environmental and climate change issues, most notably in being the first state in the country to adopt a 100% renewables target for electricity (2015’s House Bill 623).

We are making great progress on green energy and transportation, but it’s still not fast enough given the urgency. Nor have our efforts been ambitious enough across several related environmental and social issues.

In addition to climate change, we need to also tackle a wider range of sustainability issues like solid waste and plastic pollution, access to clean water, affordable housing, sustainable agriculture, reforestation and natural and cultural resource management.

We need to ensure that we are resilient in the face of both man-made and natural disasters that may come our way. We can expect the consequences of climate change to worsen, so we must proactively take steps to ensure that our infrastructure and energy systems are future-proofed and resilient.

We also know that low- and moderate-income households and traditionally marginalized groups tend to bear the greatest burden when it comes to community impacts. Any solutions to these issues should ensure that solutions to these issues are equitable and don’t leave anyone behind, as has too often happened before.

Notably, Hawaii is 90% or more dependent on imports of food, energy and many other goods. If anything happens to the global economy or supply chains, short-term or long-term, we will immediately suffer here in Hawaii because we are so dependent on outside food and energy sources.

This does not have to be. Before Western contact, Hawaii had as many as a million people living entirely off the bounty of this land and our oceans, with no modern technology. With modern technology, and a population not much larger now (about 1.4 million full-time residents), it is possible for most of our food to be produced locally — with better availability of healthy and tasty food as a great additional benefit.

Hawaii County’s leaders have stepped up to the plate and created a new Office of Sustainability, Climate, Equity and Resilience to tackle these issues. This new office reports to the mayor and will have up to five full-time staff to achieve its mission.

The bill to create OSCER was primarily the brainchild of Council chair Heather Kimball, who represents the Hamakua Coast on the Big Island, with the support of the Roth administration. She worked in climate change policy for many years before joining the County Council, and she’s been highly effective at bringing various constituencies and communities together behind a common cause.

Councilmember Rebecca Villegas was a co-sponsor and helped bring the Kona communities into a broader consensus around the bill’s objectives.

OSCER’s role, still being fleshed out under the leadership of new administrator Bethany Morrison, is to coordinate and manage policies to improve the county’s sustainability and resilience with respect to climate change and other natural and also human-caused hazards.

The office will promote environmental justice and equity by considering the impacts of such programs on lower- and middle-income individuals and historically marginalized groups, ensuring that the benefits of such programs reach all county residents.

Kimball has explained that the elevation of this office to the county’s cabinet-level was intended to help ensure coordinated action internally and externally. The bill also established a Climate Action Revolving Fund, which will support policies and programs that promote the objectives of the office and result in cost savings for the county. These cost savings will then be available to seed new climate action programs.

OSCER is focused on addressing the implementation gaps for various sustainability, climate and resilience plans created by the county but not yet implemented. It is also meant to maximize grant opportunities available through federal programs from the Inflation Reduction Act and other federal bills, ultimately delivering significant funding for the county.

, our organization, was engaged in the discussions that led to the bill for a number of years before the bill finally passed (Kimball is on the advisory board of Think BIG and is a co-founder).

It is our hope that this new office will be highly effective in coordinating county government and stakeholders in achieving the necessary changes in how our county does business, in a timeframe that really matters.

Hawaii County has abundant renewable energy, land and water resources. Many Hawaii Island individuals, companies and NGOs are also dedicated to sustainability and resilience.

With this backdrop and historically unprecedented access to federal and private funding, we can accelerate our transition to a sustainable, equitable and resilient island and perhaps also inspire action across the globe. We believe that the OSCER will be a crucial enabler in this journey.

For us, this means county government should lead the way for the county as a whole by rapidly transforming its buildings and fleets to 100% green energy, a process that will surely save significant amounts of public money due to dramatically reduced fuel costs.

We also look forward to OSCER coordinating actions across departments and community groups on local food production and resilience. Local food production is probably the biggest gap in our overall resilience simply because we are so remote and we produce so little of our own food currently.

We at Think BIG expect that this new office will be highly effective in coordinating county government and stakeholders to achieve the actions necessary for our sustainability and resilience in a timeframe that really matters.

We are excited about the potential of this new office and urge all stakeholders to contact the county to share their hopes and ideas for this new office as it ramps up its activities.