It’s Climate Solutions week on NPR. HPR highlights a new climate technology that’s getting local attention.
Marine carbon capture takes carbon dioxide from the air and stores it in the ocean to fight global warming. The Molokaʻi-based organization ʻĀina Momona is taking the lead locally — it has received grant funding from an organization called Carbon180.
Executive Director Ua Ritte told HPR that he thinks it's important for Hawaiʻi to participate in national and global conversations about climate change solutions.
“Because we're facing the same problems, and even more so, in Hawaiʻi, everybody lives around the ocean,” Ritte said. “We know that it's rising, and you know, will it be part of the conversation on how to take steps to mediate that, because it's affecting us and our reefs big time. ... We cannot get left out because climate change affects us a lot.”
HPR also spoke with Carbon180 team members Eric Sutton and Stacy Aguilera-Peterson.
The nongovernmental organization supports the field of carbon removal and provides information to communities.
Aguilera-Peterson believes that mCDR technology is very context-specific.
"Communities are different; coastal communities are very unique across the U.S. and the world, and the ecosystem is different as well," she said. "So, what might work well in one place might be very different in another place."
Aguilera-Peterson said researchers in Hawaiʻi are actively studying how mCDR technologies could potentially benefit local resources and communities.
Carbon180's grant to ʻĀina Momona will fund two years of general operations and carbon removal work.
Sutton explained that their partnership encourages self-determination in community-led projects.
“We've seen time and again that solutions, if it's climate solutions, environmental solutions, any other solution to community, is more durable if it comes from the community," Aguilera-Peterson said. "These top-down outside approaches to how we live and how things are built only work over the long term, if it's built by the people that are living with it.”
“I think we're really trying to figure out, like, what are those guardrails, what are those boundaries, what are those lines that communities want to articulate. We think that the folks that we're partnering with are doing a really fantastic job at figuring out what those boundary lines are."
Learn more about carbon removal here.
This story aired on The Conversation on May 19, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this story for the web.
