scenario tool needed for sustainability in Hawaii
So, we in Hawaii are a coupla years behind Australia , New Zealand, and the UK, in terms of acquiring some fairly granular decision support tools on climate change.
Still, if Hawaii starts now, we might be able to leapfrog those leading edge efforts to develop an island-specific modeling tool that helps our businesses, our communities and our elected officials to comprehensively account for the impacts of our consumption, technology, and policy decisions.
Like them, we need a tool that will alow us to construct detailed scenarios based on changes in technology, policies, markets and consumption patterns, on top of an interactive database for resource and energy information.
We need to be able to make forecasts and projections of future demand over a long-term planning horizon, while being able to take into account issues of ‘burden-shifting’.
Moreover, we need to be able to identify and compare the impacts of various industrial sectors and products with a holistic view of supply chain impacts, and provide detailed data on CO2 emissions and and ecological footprints for each segment of consumer and commercial spending, including:
* Food
* Energy
* Housing
* Infrastructure
* Consumer goods
* Transport
* Waste
Finally, we need to be able to spatially disaggregate the statewide data down to the county and ahupua`a level, and then run scenarios to explore different options or outcomes.
When this is ready, we should be able to assess the relative footprints of, say, different transport modes such as the Superferry, interisland jets, or cargo shipping. Or various energy sources such sugar cane, algae, solar.
Sure, there are general purpose models already available that can offer broad brush indicators of Hawaii’s vulnerability to supply disruptions, energy prices or tourism shocks, yet they are based on continental US data and assumptions.
Hawaii’s significantly greater dependence means that our footprint is significantly different from other states.
Moreover, by inference, Hawaii’s transformation toward more sustainable development will entail significantly greater change in island life than elsewhere.
We certainly want a scenario tool that accounts for these differences.
To get there, we will probably build on top of Hawaii’s input-output tables, which are also available for each County. We will want to conduct a ‘material flow’ analysis to translate dollars into physical units, followed by an ‘ecological impact’ analysis to translate these quantities into emssions equivalents, and then an ‘ecological footprint’ analysis to translate this consumption and emissions into their global land area equivalents of biocapacity required.
IMHO, such an an integrated resource-environment modeling tool will prove indispensible as an aid to decision-making on policy, on technology, and on investments, both public and private.
My exploration of these prospects with the prominent model builders suggests that Hawaii could, indeed, enable another major advance in the art of footprinting and decision tool-building for sustainability issues.
We’ll see if some heavy networking in the weeks ahead can surface sufficient interest from civil, corporate and political leaders to give this puppy some legs.
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