Caught in the crosshairs of climate change
Former Hawaii governor and Maui County mayor, Linda Lingle, was still an up-and-coming Maui County Council member when she angrily shook a copy of The Maui News over her head while grilling the developers of the proposed Fairmont Kea Lani Hotel.
The developers did not appreciate Lingle’s opposition at the time, but she helped prevent them from making a grave mistake. This was in the 1980s when major hotels were sprouting like mushrooms on Maui. Kea Lani’s developers sought permission to build their Mediterranean-style hotel right on Polo Beach. They claimed there was adequate distance between the highwater mark and proposed site.
The front-page photograph on Lingle’s newspaper said different. Snapped after a recent south swell pulled much of the sand from the beach, the picture presented a far less optimistic highwater mark than the developer’s cherry-picked line in the sand. Under pressure from Lingle and other council members, the developers reluctantly agreed to shift their hotel inland.
Had those builders gotten their way, the Kea Lani would be yet another Maui property now caught in the crosshairs of rising sea levels and dwindling political support to help them survive. Stakeholders of every endangered oceanfront property in the state had to be shaken by last week’s unanimous decision by the state Board of Land and Natural Resources to pull back from funding half of a $10 million beach restoration and berm enhancement project proposed by the Kaanapali Operators Association Inc. The stretch of sand from Puu Kekaa to Hanakaoo Point is disappearing, palm trees and sidewalks are falling into the ocean and property owners fear amenities and even buildings will be undermined next.
Board members offered a variety of reasons for their decision, ranging from an unwillingness to spend state funds on private enterprises, to viewing the efforts as throwing money at a lost cause. These coastal concerns are not limited to Kaanapali or Hawaii, but pose challenges worldwide. Dramatic footage of a North Carolina home crumpling into the sea this week provided a graphic example of communities scrambling to strike a balance between preservation and managed retreat. And finding Mother Nature cares as little for bureaucratic stalling as she does stubborn persistence.
Impacts from the BLNR’s decision could be wide-ranging and unfold for decades to come. It is an official admission of what climate scientists have been warning for years. The ocean is coming and we need to get out of its way.
What happens to Hawaii if many of its primary economic drivers face ruin? Did the operators of our oceanfront hotels think they were too big to fail? Did they expect the people who granted their building permits to still be around to protect them?
Without a plan for retreat and great political and economic will, this has potential to be a slow-motion cataclysm of condemned buildings, bankrupt property owners, lost tax revenue and ecological degradation.