Honolulu has a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 45% compared to 2015 levels — and the deadline is next year.
The city is likely to fall short — by a lot.
Ben Sullivan, the deputy director for the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, said that Honolulu is on track to achieve closer to a 15% reduction, which is well below the stated goal.
"We are reducing in most areas, but we're not reducing fast enough," said Sullivan, adding that the pandemic was a "very significant distraction."
The Resilience Office's Climate Action Plan laid out a number of sectors where the city could cut carbon emissions. The largest target areas are building efficiency and transportation.
While there has been progress to ensure new construction is solar and electric-vehicle ready, Sullivan said that making existing buildings as energy efficient as possible is a "huge challenge we've only begun to address."
Step one has been tracking energy and water usage in large buildings across the city, a process known as benchmarking.
"Different buildings perform differently," Sullivan said. "You need to be able to compare the performance of one building to the other to understand, 'Hey, is my building actually doing well? Or is it something we can improve on?'"
The Resilience Office anticipates that benchmarking will result in a 7% reduction in carbon emissions from large buildings by 2030. Beyond that, the city hopes to launch a retrofitting program, which would upgrade old buildings to be more energy-efficient. Sullivan said one is in the works, but it likely won't launch before next year.
For all the headaches involved in reducing emissions in building infrastructure, overhauling transportation stands to be even trickier.
The city ultimately envisions a multi-modal system that combines expanded bike paths, revamped bus routes and the embattled Honolulu rail project.
Sullivan acknowledged the controversy surrounding the development and construction of the Honolulu Skyline, but added that it was key to reducing Honolulu's transportation emissions.
"That Skyline is going to be a transformative project for transportation," he said.
Sullivan estimates that reducing residents' dependence on cars will cut greenhouse gases and save money in the long term. But getting to that point will take time, and so far Honolulu's transportation emission levels have remained relatively stagnant.
That's pretty typical, said Stefan Samarripas. He's on the policy team of the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which recently released a scorecard showing how 75 major US cities were making progress towards their clean energy goals.
Transportation was a sore spot for almost everybody. Samarripas and his team found just four cities that had reduced emissions in that sector, and only one of those cities — San Diego — was on track to achieve its goals.
ACEEE ranked Honolulu 29th overall, a small drop from its spot at 25th the last time the organization released a scorecard in 2021.
"Cities in the United States are the primary driver of economic activity," Samarripas said. "Because they're the primary driver of economic activity, they're also going to be a big, big driver of greenhouse gas emissions."
Samarripas said that's why commitments at the municipal level to reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change matter.
Sullivan said the Resilience Office is taking lessons from the last five years as it prepares to update its Climate Action Plan for 2025-2030. He added that outreach will be key to the plan's success. This go-around, the office plans to provide funding directly to front-line community organizations to do their own engagement, which Sullivan called "essential."
"We cannot sit here on the 11th floor of the Fasi Building and just kind of dictate the things that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Sullivan said. "It's about making people's lives better. It's about making neighborhoods more functional, it's about saving people money."
