Waihapakai - understanding practices to educate on native abundance (UPENA) project abstract summary:waihapakai proposes to envision a new hawaiian fishpond in the stream mouth of the punaluu ahupuaa

The U.S. Department of the Interior is providing a $500,000 project grant award under the Native Hawaiian Climate Resilience Program (CFDA 15.098) to the Waihapakai organization. The purpose of the grant is to envision and develop a new Hawaiian fishpond in the Punaluu ahupuaa stream mouth in Hawaii. The project, titled "Understanding Practices to Educate on Native Abundance (UPENA)," aims to demonstrate how constructing new fishponds can enhance climate resilience for Native Hawaiian communities facing the impacts of sea level rise and climate change. Waihapakai, a Native Hawaiian Organization, will execute the 5-year project from October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2029, with the goal of creating a mindset that fishponds can be built to adapt to rising seas rather than viewing them as obstacles. The project will integrate traditional ecological knowledge with contemporary scientific approaches to build community resilience and preserve Native Hawaiian cultural practices.

We know that fishponds are one of the best native hawaiian practices to increase resilience for a community, both for food security and ecology. Punaluu and the surrounding communities have a large population of native hawaiians. Climate change and sea level rise is real. The punaluu community is a critical subject to adverse effects of sea level rise and climate change. The mission of our project is to create the mindset that we can build new fishponds using sea level rise to our advantage rather than seeing IT as an obstacle. Our project is named understanding practice to educate on native abundance, or UPENA. For US hawaiians, native ecology and traditional practice are bound tightly to each other. With the UPENA project, we hope to look forward to the changing climate and the rising seas, to adapt our practice of hawaiian fishponds so that the native hawaiians and native hawaiian communities are climate resilient for many generations to come.