How will Waikiki adapt to climate change?

Maintaining the allure of Waikiki’s beaches is tough going as the rising levels of the Pacific Ocean threatens to obliterate its lustre.

Compounded by climate change, Oahu’s tourist industry is dealing with a continual demand for a solution to save the area’s beaches. Local businesses, and the island as a whole, depend on visitors for its financial livelihood. The inevitable change of appearance of the popular destination is something the state as a whole will have to contend with in the years to come.

“A Waikiki without beaches, I think, will be a very different place,” said professor Chip Fletcher, University of Hawaii and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.

Coastal erosion is happening, on average, upwards of two feet a year, and Fletcher sees how the development of Waikiki did not take this into consideration. So far, seawalls have been put in front of many beachfront hotels to keep the tide at bay. These infrastructures and other offshore barriers, however, have been haphazardly constructed over the years.

“Waikiki will eventually turn into a shoreline characterized by seawalls with no beach in front of it,” Fletcher said, “and there are pieces, big pieces, of Waikiki right now that are already like that.

“If we want to maintain a beach in Waikiki, we’re going to have to find new sources of sand to nourish the beach, similar to what took place earlier in 2012.” That “sand nourishment” project ended in June of that year, overseen by the State Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands.

In mid-October of 2013, the City and County of Honolulu did its own similar project with Kuhio Beach, overfilling the area with sand to cover rocks and exposed concrete pilings. Half of the amount of sand that was brought in was washed away initially — and, according to a Department of Parks and Recreation spokeswoman, a common occurrence in such matters — but an ocean swell that followed reportedly brought back much of the needed sand.

Sea walls and beach replenishment projects offer a temporary fixes to problems will rise again and again. And as rising sea levels threaten to obliterate Waikiki’s beaches, another concern behind that is the flooding of the streets of east Honolulu. Projections in the year 2100 show the sea level possibly rising near or over Kapiolani Boulevard.

“Waikiki is going to need much more than just seawalls,” said Fletcher. “It’s going to need to deal with this problem of the rise in the water table and the rise of seawater into the storm sewers.”

Kyo-ya hotels in Waikiki — which contributed half-a-million dollars to the 2012 sand nourishment project — have begun to take small steps to adjust to similar environmental concerns, like recycling bins in each room and using island-made produce and products to cut down on shipping costs and fossil fuel use.

“As a responsible owner of a property, it’s our responsibility to look after it as a long-term investment,” said Ernie Nishizaki, the hotel chain’s executive vice president.

“The beach restoration project is something that Waikiki, in general, is going to have to be looked at as an ongoing thing. Waikiki is primarily sand that is brought in from somewhere else.”

(That “somewhere else” is now sand brought in from offshore, rather than sand that was barged in from such faraway places as California and Australia over a six decade-plus period.)

Surfrider Foundation spokesman Stuart Coleman said reducing dependence on fossil fuels can help better deal with the rise in sea levels and climate change.

“It’s not about slowing down climate change or sea level rise,” he said, “because we can’t do that at this point except (by) mitigating the things that are causing it.”

The level of greenhouse gases related to increased fossil fuel-related emissions of carbon dioxide may be affecting the amount of melting of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice (although the results of a study released in December and published in the Geophysical Research Letters posits that it’s not so much the gases affecting the increased melting of Arctic sea ice as much as a 60-90 year cycle of the variability of the North Atlantic sea surface temperatures).

In its project report (PDF), the DLNR stated that “over the next few decades, regular maintenance will be necessary to prolong the life of (Waikiki) beach, and we will look to many partners to support these steps,” naming in particular the State Department of Health, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Coastal Zone Management Program, NOAA-National Marine Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“This was a very complicated project that required patience and cooperation from many different stakeholders,” said project administrator Sam Lemmo. The project’s performance is being monitored by University of Hawaii graduate students in a two-year study, and after the first year, the data so far shows a loss of about 27 percent of its sand volume. 

Here’s hoping a long-term plan will be more effective than the numerous “bandages” that have attempted to stem the erosive surge of the Pacific Ocean.