Environmental report card weak
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Science Writer
The state Environmental Council gave Hawai'i mixed marks in its Environmental Report Card for 2001.
The 15-member council's annual report gave the state a "B" for progress toward environmental goals, but a "C+" for the status of environmental conditions in the Islands.
The rough letter grades are the same as last year's, but there were changes within the components that make up the scoring.
The Environmental Council, made up of members of the public, looks at a range of statistics to come up with its figures.
For example, under water quality, it looks at the number of days that beaches in the Islands are posted as unsafe.
There were 20 such days last year, gaining Hawai'i just a "C+" score. The state's goal in this category had been to cut the number from the average of 22 days during the previous three years to 14 days last year.
Hawai'i has been reducing the amount of waste it produces per person, although not as much as the Environmental Council would like.
The average of the previous three years was 8.4 pounds of waste per person. In 2001, the state cut that average to 7.3 pounds, but the goal was 6.4 pounds per person. The council eventually would like to cut even that number nearly in half.
The council's theme for the annual report is the state's biodiversity. Outgoing council Chairman William Petti said he hopes the citizen council and its associated state agency, the Office of Environmental Quality Control, will be able to work together to improve the state's natural environment.
To do so, it will need to change some of its standards for judging environmental improvement, said Marjorie Ziegler of the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund.
The council gave the state a "B" for increasing the proportion of the state budget spent on the environment, but Ziegler said the standard should be based on the work actually done on behalf of native species and ecosystems.
"They need to look at the number of acres that are actually managed. I think the state has been remiss in recovering species," she said.
The annual report said the council tried to focus last year on one class of threats to native ecosystems: invasive species. It cited alien tree frogs, miconia, snakes and fire ants as some of the many serious threats to the Islands' environment.
The council has worked with other agencies to produce flashcards of the 20 most serious alien species threats, which will be handed out to schoolteachers and the Invasive Species committees on individual islands.
