Abstract

The O‘ahu Resilience Strategy outlines 44 actions to address climate change and the resilience of the City and County of Honolulu. This Strategy was created by residents and community leaders, using the City Resilience Framework (CRF), which identifies 12 drivers of resilient cities across the areas of health and wellbeing, economy and society, infrastructure and environment, and leadership and strategy. Resilience is defined as “the ability to survive, adapt and thrive regardless of what shocks or stresses come our way.” Public perceptions around O‘ahu’s top shocks (events which occur rapidly and unexpectedly) and stresses (ongoing strains on society that gradually sap community strength) formed the basis of how to frame our resilience challenges. Consistently, individuals and groups ranked O‘ahu’s top five shocks as: hurricanes, tsunamis, infrastructure failure, rainfall flooding, and external economic crises. Just as consistently, island residents ranked O‘ahu’s top five stresses as: cost of living, aging infrastructure, climate change, lack of affordable housing, and over-reliance on imports.