HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – A new study is rallying coastal communities to protect themselves amid big cuts to federal climate resilience programs.
The Surfrider Foundation’s released its 2025 State of the Beach report, noting more than half of America’s beaches could disappear by the year 2100 due to climate-driven sea level rise.
“We’re in a bit of a limbo situation right now with the government shutdown and the funding there, but there are a number of folks on both sides of the aisle in Congress, who understand the importance of, for example, funding for sea grants, for coastal resilience for the coastal zone management programs in states through NOAA and have been fighting tirelessly to ensure that those dollars remain,” said Emma Haydocy, author of the study and Surfrider’s Senior Manager of the Coasts & Climate Initiative.
Surfrider’s report offers a snapshot of grassroots climate resilience efforts across the country, including the Oahu North Shore Coastal Resilience Working Group’s beach management study and climate action program.
Residents help restore coastal dunes and wetlands, remove invasive species, and build natural barriers to control flooding and erosion, like native plants.
Meantime, UH researchers warn 40% of Oahu’s beaches could be underwater in 25 years, a blow to the island’s tourism economy.
The UH School of Ocean & Earth Science & Technology (SOEST) provides critical data that informs government policy and development — decades of research that inform some of the country’s most progressive setback laws.
“That data is needed in order to plan roads, in order to plan new development,” said SOEST dean Chip Fletcher. “Permitting new roads, permitting new development that takes 10 years easily and by the time they’re actually building. the year 2050 is going to be upon us, and they need to have designed their buildings and their construction projects.”
Federal grants help researchers protect Hawaii’s shorelines — by tracking annual rates of erosion, creating flooding models due to sea level rise and extreme weather, and studying rising temperatures’ impact on health and food production.
“This work is a critical foundation to building community resilience as we move towards a future that’s going to be more and more impacted by climate change,” Fletcher said.
But the school lost $28 million in federal grants this year — 12% of its budget.
Many long-time experts were let go, leaving research programs in limbo and setting back the state’s efforts to protect coastal communities.
“We are scrambling to continue our planning for building resilience in the face of growing heat, sea level rise impacts, such as coastal erosion, wave wash over the shoreline, groundwater rising as the ocean rises and creating new wetlands in our urban communities, the loss of our gravity-based drainage, our stormwater drainage and urban settings, you lose drainage as sea level rises, and then flooding when it rains at high tide and there’s no drainage, that’s called compound flooding. these are all scenarios that afflict our urban areas,” Fletcher explained.
Fletcher says they’re working to fill the gaps, but have had to change course to navigate an uncertain future.
“There has been a scramble to write grants under new rules in the federal administration,” Fletcher said. “When it comes to climate change and community resilience, those are not research subjects that the current administration is interested in funding.”
”We’re basically at a standstill with regard to building resiliency in these communities that is founded on a scientific basis to understand where we can focus our energies, where we can focus our finances, our capital,” said Fletcher, who adds that work still needs to be done to model the North Shore and leeward coast.
There were also plans to install digital cameras and drainage sensors to collect real-time data but those are shelved for now.
Fletcher says they’re turning to private donors and state agencies to tap into a yearly fund of about $100 million expected from the new “Green Fee” starting on Jan. 1, 2026, an increase to the state’s Transient Accommodations Tax (TAT) for tourists. But there are constraints.
“There’s a strong objective to get sort of shovel ready projects that can show rapid completion, rapid success, so that next year, the green fee can show that it has been very effective,” he said.
For now, Fletcher said they secured $2.4 million from the U.S. military to start modeling Waianae Moku.
Nonprofits are also rallying coastal residents and supporters to fill the gaps in funding.
“Traditional approaches, putting sand on the beach, building up hard armoring are failing and actually making this problem worse,” Haydocy of Surfrider said.
“Because [climate change] is such a big issue, there’s this paralysis around action, but we know through the work of our network at Surfrider that solutions exist.”
Click here to read the Surfrider Foundation 2025 State of the Beach Report.
Click here to see SOEST’s coastal research.
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