VNR: UH hosts community leaders to create a sustainable, innovative future for Hawaiʻi

Link to video and sound (details below): https://go.hawaii.edu/nJj

WHAT: The University of Hawaiʻi hosted nearly 300 community leaders, stakeholders and members of the public interested in furthering efforts to help create sustainable and just solutions for healthy communities in Hawaiʻi and around the world. The focus of the UH Innovation Conference x Pi‘o Summit Advancing a Circular Economy in Hawaiʻi was to increase contemporary applications of ancestral innovation and resource management sciences. Those who attended were able to take away frameworks, principles and awareness of existing networks of practice to bring back to their communities.

As the state’s largest research institution, UH has a kuleana (responsibility) to help improve the quality of life for our residents and to those around the world through innovative research and education.

WHY: The pursuit of profit and convenience has led to growing consumerism, throwaway culture and monumental waste, resulting in a linear “take, make, use, waste” economy built on extracting finite resources to create products destined for landfills. Recently, there has been a growing demand for urgent action on issues regarding limited natural resources, biodiversity loss, climate change, energy efficiency, mass waste and pollution. 

Governments across the globe are searching for solutions that separate economic growth from environmental degradation while ensuring long-term prosperity. In ancestral Hawaiʻi, a “give, take, regenerate” circular system led to the development of balanced structures of resource management. One steadily advancing movement is aimed at designing a “circular economy,” where waste is minimal, materials and resources are preserved for as long as possible, and modes of production mimic nature’s regenerative processes. 

WHEN: December 13

WHERE: Hawaiʻi Convention Center

SESSION TOPICS:

• Ancestral Circular Economy in Action
• Contemporary Restoration of an Ahupuaʻa
• Experiences, Challenges and Best Practices of Circular Economy Interventions
• UH’s Role in Creating Opportunities for Hawaiʻi’s Future

ADDITIONAL INFO:

• Advancing a Circular Economy in Hawaiʻi is sponsored by the UH Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, The GSI Family of Companies, Elemental Excelerator and Kamehameha Schools in partnership with Piʻo Summit 2023 and Ulupono Initiative.

Link to video and sound (details below): https://go.hawaii.edu/nJj

VIDEO:

BROLL: trt 2:00

0:00-1:24: various shots of the Advancing a Circular Economy in Hawaiʻi conference

1:24-1:45: generic video of water resources

1:45-2:00: generic video of agriculture

SOUNDBITES: 

Kamanamaikalani Beamer, Director and Professor at UH Mānoa Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies

(:11)

“Solving for a circular economy, fixing the economy here in Hawaiʻi to be more regenerative, less extractive and exploitative of our environment, is something critical for the future of all of Hawaiʻi.”

Kamuela Enos, Director of the UH Office of Indigenous Knowledge and Innovation

(:22)

“We don’t solve things instantly. I think we begin though, to set in precedent a new way of understanding of how we enact an island economy given these changes, which are challenges, but the opportunity of the precedent of what’s here that we can pull from this corpus of knowledge.”