In this episode host Stephen Goldsmith interviews Alan Clinton, the administrative planning officer for the county of Kaua'i, about the county's Sea Level Rise Constraint District Viewer, an award-winning data visualization for protecting and preserving the island coastline.
In this episode host Stephen Goldsmith interviews Alan Clinton, the administrative planning officer for the county of Kaua'i, about the county's Sea Level Rise Constraint District Viewer, an award-winning data visualization for protecting and preserving the island coastline. They discuss the importance of a proactive response to chronic erosion and rising sea levels, and how to integrate cutting-edge data visualization technology into policy-making. Kaua'i offers a blueprint for other coastal communities seeking to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
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Data-Smart City Solutions, housed at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, is working to catalyze the adoption of data projects on the local government level by serving as a central resource for cities interested in this emerging field. We highlight best practices, top innovators, and promising case studies while also connecting leading industry, academic, and government officials. Our research focus is the intersection of government and data, ranging from open data and predictive analytics to civic engagement technology. We seek to promote the combination of integrated, cross-agency data with community data to better discover and preemptively address civic problems. To learn more visit us online and follow us on Twitter.
Betsy Gardner:
This is Betsy Gardner, editor at Data Smart City Solutions at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. And you're listening to the Data-Smart City Pod where we bring on top innovators and experts to discuss the future of cities and how to become data smart.
Stephen Goldsmith:
This is Steve Goldsmith, a professor of Urban Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School with another one of our podcasts. Today is a particularly interesting podcast on the relationship between mapping and the environment and sustainability. We are delighted to have as our guest, Alan Clinton, the administrative planning officer for the County of Kaua‘i in Hawaii. Welcome Alan.
Alan Clinton:
Thanks for having me, Steve.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So before we get to the work that you're doing, the important work that you're doing in your county, you had an interesting path on your way to the current position. Tell us a little bit about that, please.
Alan Clinton:
Sure, absolutely. So I graduated high school from a school in Ohio and then I actually moved over to Purdue University in Indiana. I mean, I had a very strong interest in plant ecology, evolutionary sciences. And during that time, I was actually working a lot with Habitat for Humanity, learned a lot more about the city and regional planning space and took that opportunity to pursue an AmeriCorps program following my undergraduate experience and came to Kaua‘i to help families here locally build homes for about a year. And that really set me on my journey to return to Kaua‘i once all my education was wrapped up and completed. So I was really excited to come back here right before the pandemic struck.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Just a plug before we begin is, you know, I was the Mayor of a city down the road from Purdue. So I'm partial to Purdue, Indianapolis, and I was Chair of AmeriCorps for nine years. So I, I appreciate your background in both respects.
Alan Clinton:
Yeah, absolutely. I will admit to you, I was a frequent Indie 500 attendee for about 18 years straight there from the time I was seven until I couldn't feasibly get back every year on a consistent basis.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Well, good, I'm glad you left a little money in our local economy! So, let's get to the issue at hand, which is sea level rise and you have, Hawaii has a sea level rise constraint district. But I'm particularly interested in your dynamic scientific modeling for climate change and how that affects land use regulations because that's what I find most interesting and almost novel about what you're doing. So, let's start first with a little bit about what are those regulations, and how do you think about them? Then we'll go to mapping and, and talk a little bit also about your partnership with the University.
Alan Clinton:
Yeah, absolutely. So, for us, we've been trying for about, I would say a little bit over a decade now to try to find the best way to incorporate science into our regulatory program for development. Generally speaking, we want to make sure that we are mindful of geography, geography of hazards, the geography of future conditions to help prepare our built environment for the future. And so about 10 years ago, we were able to pass a shoreline setback ordinance. That was our first attempt to take historic data about observed conditions and embed it into a policy. And so that was really exciting for us and we've since been able to update those data once the latest and greatest science was provided.
But we ran into a bit of a snag when we were trying to find new ways to incorporate data about future conditions into our regulatory framework and the Sea Level Rise Constraint District is the result of those efforts. And so it was the process of trying to find a regulatory tool that would allow us to take passive flooding models and high wave run up models associated with sea level rise well up into the 21st century and find a mitigated action that we can hone in on to prepare our coastal environment for these future hazards. And so the mapping component was obviously key and critical because as we move into these very large big data sets, it was essential that we have modern policy vessels for visualizing these tools but also absorbing these new data once they're made available.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So there's a lot there. Let me unpack it a little bit. So you get these massive data sets, then talk to me a little bit about how you visualize those. You have this Sea level rise viewer, which I think is ArcGIS. But talk to me about the importance of and how you go about data visualization.
Alan Clinton:
Yeah. So this element is absolutely key and quite frankly with data sets of this size, there is no practical way, even if we wanted to, to show it on paper. To provide justice to the data, it would require hundreds if not thousands of sheets of paper to appropriately show these data in an index or some type of paper format. And so almost out of necessity, we were required to find a dynamic map tool that would allow people to hone in on their area of interest.
And the exciting part about that as well is it did also force us to formally identify and define the viewer in the ordinance. And in a sense, codifying the online digital asset into law. And the valuable thing about that is as the new data is available, it's a much easier lift for a policy to absorb new data than starting a policy from scratch.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So before we kind of get to the effect of all of this on day to day life in Hawaii as a reference to the regulation, talk to us just for a second about data visualization as an education tool. How do you use it with the community and how do you use it with the elected officials in the county?
Alan Clinton:
Visualization is absolutely key. And these dynamic tools that we now have access to allow us to sort of, I would say tailor the visualization to the viewer. And that's sort of the graduated step of these visualization tools is we can not only showcase the data in a manner that's consistent with the policy, consistent with the program helpful for implementation later on, but really helpful in the process of developing the policy, getting it vetted with community partners, with coastal land attorneys, with coastal sea engineers and even with members of our community, we need to have the visualization tools to communicate the data to a very wide group of stakeholders with different expertise and the ability to use a tool like the e instant application was incredibly important for us because we were able to showcase that data in a variety of ways without misrepresenting the data and making sure that our viewing audience had a good understanding of what they were seeing.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Well, a lot of our audiences here are, you could say stakeholders, you have these ordinances and you talk about obviously, sea level estimates keep changing because of the environmental conditions. So how does the dynamic mapping and use of data and the dynamic regulations affect day to day life in the county? How does it translate into building codes and flood control regulations and the like?
Alan Clinton:
So historically, I would say it hasn't because we haven't had the appropriate policy tools and the policy vessels to absorb that data. And so people have been relying on sort of the historic FEMA flood program maps and some of our other policies that rely on historic data that may have been codified 10, 20, 15 years ago, that don't necessarily reflect the conditions on the ground today.
When we adopted the Sea Level Rise Constraint District, there was a pretty substantial international consensus on the rates and the amount of sea level rise that we are expected to see by the end of the 21st century, we now expect those numbers to be a little bit higher. And so we do expect in time to adjust our models, bring in new data from our partners at the University of Hawaii, but we're also working with them as they go through the process of creating higher fidelity models so that we can get more granular, more specific so that in the midst of our implementation processes, we can be very sure of the decisions that we are making that they are backed by authoritative sources.
So with this tool in place, we expect here in the next year or two as our partners in the University on the academic side, to refine that data. We hope to absorb the updated information into our Viewer within the next couple of years.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Tell us, what is that partnership with the University of Hawaii? What what department and what do they do to assist you?
Alan Clinton:
So I say partnership because I like collectively talking as a team with all of our amazing kind of colleagues in this community of practice. I wouldn't say necessarily there is a formal partnership with our team and the coastal geology group, now the Climate Resilience Collaborative, at the University of Hawaii led by Dr. Chip Fletcher. What they do is they oftentimes will consult for the state of Hawaii and they'll create statewide models for things like past flooding highway, run up coastal erosion. And we as a another public agency work with them to absorb their data, refine it, figure out the best way to implement it.
It's an ongoing relationship that's very free flowing. We can tap each other for a variety of different resources, those at the University that are really embedded in the academic space, we regularly rely on their expertise to conduct the work house that we just cannot do and then we try to find ways to adopt their deliverables into our framework. And so it's a very high quality working relationship and in the midst of this situation where I think we're, I wouldn't necessarily say that there's a lot of institutional trust going on. It's been very helpful for us to define our roles and understand how we can best support each other in a manner that folks find trustworthy and genuine.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Yeah, just so I understand you, you have a collaboration, you don't have a formal contract with the university, but you collaborate, take advantage of their resources?
Alan Clinton:
That's correct there, there's a couple of smaller contracts in the past, we may have executed for, for example, updating our shoreline setback observation data. I think we did a contract with them formally but more often than not, we're, we're utilizing resources that they provide where they received grants at the state level or the federal level to do statewide analysis.
Stephen Goldsmith:
When we talked before, I think you mentioned that the Sea Level Rise Viewer was actually defined in the ordinance itself. That seems a little bit unusual. What's the benefit of that?
Alan Clinton:
That's sort of the twist with this policy. We full well realize — and this builds off of the discussion we had a little bit earlier understanding that paper wasn't necessarily the best way to communicate these data — we really needed this dynamic tool to point people in the right direction. And so having an authoritative source of information is critically important. And transferring that from a paper format to a digital format is something that we all realized, I think it was on the horizon, there is something we really need to prioritize, especially with all of this data that is available.
So the value of having this tool formally codified into law is it allows us to absorb the latest and greatest science into our regulatory framework without starting the process from scratch of creating a new policy. And that I think is really key and critical because we realize that science will be improved over time and having to start from scratch for policy development can really dampen our efforts to be very mindful of dynamic environment which we live in.
Stephen Goldsmith:
And then how does the Viewer affect people trying to get permits or build a home or how does it affect the planning department? What…just give us a little explanation about how various stakeholders utilize the Viewer?
Alan Clinton:
Yeah. So a lot of folks will use the Viewer to get a rough understanding of the impacts of their particular property. But to make matters a little bit easier, we also created a report generation tool that is associated with the viewer so that if anybody is interested in creating a report for their particular property so that they can associate that report with their application. When they go through the building permit process, they are certainly at liberty to do that. But at the same time they, if they do want to, they can directly absorb those digital layers into their autoCAD environments, into their drafting environments so that it can be very, very specific.
And we've also seen it used as a informal resource to know where to begin. Some people will need to understand ‘do we have to go through the special management process or do we just do a regular building permit?’ And we've even had examples of our coastal land use attorneys look at this viewer and say, ‘no, I don't, actually, we may not need to go through that incredibly some process because the data clearly defines that it does not impact the structure’ or in some instance, it would, that's, that was actually a really great relief when we had our legal community come to us and tell us that they're, they've been using the viewer to make their work a little bit easier.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So Alan, if you looked at the key elements of what you've done, the use of mapping, the incorporation of the tool in the ordinance, the dynamic nature of your modeling, there are counties all over the US in the world, looking at these issues, what advice would you have to them about how to use mapping, the tools you've mentioned to build better predictive models which reduce the exposures to the climate changes?
Alan Clinton:
So it's very interesting because at its core, this policy is not overly complicated and I think that's something which is very attractive, but you do need a team. We were not able to do this alone. We certainly had to work with Dr. Chip Fletcher, Dr. Tiffany Anderson, the entire Climate Resilience Collaborative at the University of Hawaii to do the initial work to generate the models. So once we had those, we were able to take their model predictions and then flip it over to the county side, go through our process of assembling our team to write the ordinance, identify the analysis that needs to be done to create those contour depths that you see in the viewer and embed them into a online application and then navigate through some of our bureaucratic processes.
And so there is a substantial team behind this work. Yeah, I wouldn't say it's overly complicated, but you do need a team that focuses on some of these different areas to move forward. We had a similar question about how to apply these models at an international scale and frankly, it's a matter of figuring out how to navigate the framework in which your locality operates. But at the core level, this is a policy that elevates structures, mitigated action based off of future conditions. And so a lot of places throughout the world or the country could implement very simple ordinances.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Thank you. Well, this is Steve Goldsmith and we are today with Alan Clinton, the Administrative Planning Officer for the County of Kaua‘i. And before we close, Alan, let us congratulate you, your project just won the 2024 National APA Sustainability and Resilience Award. There'll be a lot of people looking at you as an example, so thanks for your time today.
Alan Clinton:
Thank you kindly.
Betsy Gardner:
If you liked this podcast, please visit us at datasmartcities.org, find us on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was hosted by Stephen Goldsmith and produced by me, Betsy Gardner. Thanks for listening.