This week, HPR will be focusing on local climate solutions.
On Monday, The Conversation highlighted a native ecosystem that scores high marks when it comes to climate resilience.
Wetlands can store up to five times as much carbon as forests. They’re rich in native biodiversity, and can help protect coral reefs from runoff and absorb floodwater during storms.
But they are vulnerable — Oʻahu has lost more than half of its wetlands over the last century.
Scott Fisher has worked with the Hawaiʻi Land Trust for more than 20 years. It was around that time that the Trust took over stewardship of the Waiheʻe Refuge on Maui.
Fisher spoke to HPR about bringing the native ecosystem back and preparing it for future impacts.
“The ultimate goal is to try and improve productivity, biodiversity, and then ecosystem resilience, and so we're focusing on how do we mitigate and prepare for the impacts of climate change,” Fisher said.
Waiheʻe Refuge encompasses 277 acres with land features such as coastal wetlands, dunes, and marine shoreline.
For the past 23 years, it has been working on wetland restoration and prioritizing the removal of invasive species.
Healthy wetlands can be part of Hawaiʻi's climate solution. They are natural carbon sinks, but they are also shoreline ecosystems that are threatened by climate change.
Currently, Fisher is looking at past storms and tsunamis that have hit areas like Waiheʻe and Nuʻu Refuge on Maui to understand what events might occur in the future and how those areas might be vulnerable.
“The ecosystems that we work in have been dramatically modified, and we want to know what are the past disturbances,” he explained. “Ecological restoration really deals with the issue of disturbances, like when a tsunami or storm changes those ecosystems, how are those changes manifest in the historical record?”
He added that the trust is doing a significant amount of paleoecological and archaeobotany work to help restore the forest with native species, while also designing it specifically to attenuate sediment transportation into the wetlands.
Fisher recently completed a study on the storm and tsunami history of both Waiheʻe and Nuʻu and found evidence of tsunamis that were largely unknown to science.
The trust is now working on creating a forested bioshield around its wetlands to protect it from tsunami inudation.
This story aired on The Conversation on May 18, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this story for the web.
