PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Wendy Meguro
Co-INVESTIGATOR: Charles Fletcher
Graduate Fellows: Josephine Briones, Ireland Castillo,
Graduate Research Assistants: Eric Teeples, Gerry Failano
Junior Research Assistants: Aiko Tells, Desiree Malabed
SOEST Partners: Georgina Casey
Sea Grant Partners: Eileen Peppard, Dolan Eversole, Melanie Lander
Rendering Tutors: Christopher Lomboy, Andrew Tang

Relevance: Waikīkī, the economic hub of Hawai‘i’s tourism, is located at low elevation, adjacent to the ocean. It is threatened by flooding for multiple reasons: sea level rise, high tide flooding, high wave events, and/or periods of rain. There are anecdotal reports of basements and parking garages that flood regularly in Waikīkī under present conditions. As a major tourist destination, Waikīkī is too important to immediately retreat from sea level rise and will need to rely on an “in-place” adaptation strategy. Until this project started, no such strategy had been described in detail.

Response: This project is providing visionary and quantitative details to move the adaptation discussion forward. This research converges science with design to create conceptual design renderings as part of the near-term research to help visualize sea level rise adaptation methods, compel community discussion, and motivate large-scale decision making toward a positively adaptive built environment in densely developed coastal communities. In addition, the team is creating and will share the design brief used to guide the conceptual designs, which are based on input from stakeholders, precedent studies’ best practices, and emerging resilience guidelines.

Result: A design brief and initial renderings of adaptation strategies were drafted. Four two-hour workshops were held in 2021 with a wide range of stakeholder participants. Based on stakeholder input, two graduate fellows have created new renderings depicting adaptation strategies for two sites in Waikīkī with estimated sea level rise by the years 2050 and 2100. These renderings were presented in a public webinar on April 1, 2022. Using methods and feedback from the 2021 and 2022 project developments, two graduate research assistants, one climate resilience specialist, and one junior research assistant depicted a third site, which is located along the coast. The team created coastal, open space, and building and street renderings. Their work was presented in a webinar hosted on June 22, 2023. The project continues as the team reviews feedback and formalizes research for submission to academic journals.