Honolulu has set aside $9 million to expand community gardening, convert cesspools, and complete other climate projects this fiscal year.
That money comes from the city’s Climate Resiliency Fund, which voters approved in the 2024 election.
Special funds are not new — Honolulu has almost 70 such funds that finance everything from rental assistance to municipal golf courses. But the Climate Resiliency Fund is one of the first dedicated pots of money for climate adaptation work.
“This is not only unique for the City and County of Honolulu, but for all four counties in Hawaiʻi,” said Kealoha Fox, the executive director of the city’s Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, which administers the climate fund.
Oʻahu residents voted in favor of setting aside a small fraction of the city’s real property tax revenue for climate projects in 2024. When structuring the fund, city lawmakers noted some specific issues they wanted it to address, including cesspool pollution, the spread of invasive species, and Oʻahu’s dependence on imported food and energy.
In its first year, the climate fund supported a loan program for cesspool conversions and an initiative to help residents retrofit their homes to lower electricity bills. Fox said those types of projects tackle multiple problems at once.
“You can do climate solutions at the same time as you can also address affordability and cost of living on this island, and for us, that's a real core part of our strategy,” she said.
Honolulu’s Department of Parks and Recreation is getting money from the climate fund this year for four projects — including one that will create a new community garden at Asing Community Park in ʻEwa Beach.
DPR Spokesperson Nate Serota said this project will help meet soaring demand for urban gardening opportunities
“We have waitlists for community garden plots that go several years. I think in some cases it's actually close to a decade for some of the more popular community garden sites in town,” he said.
Serota added that this project advances another priority of the climate fund: local food security.
“Our recreational gardening program not only teaches folks about the joys of gardening, but also gives them the opportunity to supplement their diets with herbs and some fruits and vegetables that they're able to grow on their plots,” he said.
Food security focus of possible new fund
Residents will still have to wait a few years before their first harvests in ʻEwa, as construction likely won’t start on the new garden until 2027 or 2028.
In the meantime, advocates are pushing for a brand-new fund to address food insecurity.
Like the climate fund, the food security fund would use city revenue from property taxes to finance projects, but its focus would be on ending hunger and strengthening local food production, said Hawaiʻi Foodbank’s Director of Advocacy Elia Herman.
A quarter of a million people on Oʻahu are food insecure, and Herman said it’s time for the city to take action.
“Food security, much like climate, it's not something you can solve with kind of one-off annual appropriations and uncertain amounts of funding in response,” she said.
“We need sustained, reliable sources of funding. We need long-term investments, and so establishing a food security fund would do just that.”
Oʻahu voters will decide whether to sign off on a new food security fund in the upcoming election. It will be the very first proposal on their ballots.
