A new national report from the Surfrider Foundation is spotlighting Hawaii’s North Shore as a leading example of how communities can take the lead in confronting climate change — and calls for more urgent action as Hawaii’s beaches and shorelines face growing danger from erosion and rising seas.
Released Tuesday, the 2025 State of the Beach Report shifts away from grading state policies — its usual format — and instead highlights local, place-based efforts across the nation. At the center of this year’s edition is a case study on Oahu’s North Shore Coastal Resilience Working Group, a coalition of residents, scientists, cultural practitioners and policymakers working together to find solutions to chronic coastal erosion.
“In years past, we’ve looked state by state at how they stacked up policy wise,” Surfrider’s Coasts and Climate Initiative Senior Manager Emma Haydocy said. “We shifted gears a little bit this year to hyper focus on how local communities within states and regions are activating around coastal resilience and efforts to counter the effects of climate change.”
Nowhere is that more apparent than on Oahu’s North Shore, where climate change and coastal development are converging at a breaking point.
The report describes the region as an “erosion hot spot,” with 73% of beaches already chronically eroding and more than 90% projected to be by 2050.
Nearly a third of all residential properties on the North Shore now sit within 20 feet of the ocean and have been designated by the state as imminently threatened by erosion. Rising seas and stronger storm events, fueled by climate change, have accelerated shoreline loss at an alarming pace. With homes, roads and utilities packed tightly along the coast, the erosion is already claiming both private residences and public infrastructure, transforming the landscape of one of Oahu’s most iconic communities.
“This is felt very acutely and experienced very acutely on the North Shore, given just how rapid and intense and severe the erosion is,” Haydocy said. “It’s an urgent and imminent issue, and one that requires urgent action.”
The report’s release comes after a dramatic reminder of what’s at stake.
On Sept. 24, 2024, a beachfront home at “Kammies” on Sunset Beach collapsed into the ocean during the first north swell of the season, along a stretch of Ke Nui Road long plagued by severe erosion driven by sea level rise and stronger winter swells.
It was the second home to fall in two years, following a 2022 collapse at Rocky Point, underscoring the growing urgency to adapt to a shifting shoreline. Days later, state and city officials warned that several nearby homes were also at risk, citing unstable dunes, relentless wave energy and threats to public safety and marine health.
Just months later, residents, scientists and community leaders regrouped to restart the initiative.
“The North Shore Coastal Resilience Working Group already has been recognized nationally as an example of the type of community-led adaptation work and structure for that work that should be modeled elsewhere,” Haydocy said.
The Surfrider Foundation warns that by 2100, more than half of the nation’s sandy beaches could be completely lost to sea level rise driven by climate change. In California alone, that figure could reach as high as 70%.
Beach erosion is a natural process shaped by sea level rise, waves, tides, wind and flooding. Climate change, however, is intensifying these forces, with rising seas, stronger storms, and more frequent extreme weather accelerating shoreline loss. At the same time, coastal development is worsening the problem through “coastal squeeze,” which occurs when rising seas push beaches inland but buildings, roads, and seawalls block their path. Trapped, shorelines gradually narrow, erode and can disappear.
Erosion has long been part of Hawaii’s coastal story, but climate change has accelerated it. Rising seas, stronger storms and relentless winter swells are stripping sand faster than it can naturally replenish.
On the North Shore, much of the damage is compounded by shoreline armoring — more than 10,000 feet of seawalls and rock revetments, according to the report — which can worsen erosion by blocking the natural movement of sand. Homes, condos, resorts, businesses and roads now crowd much of the North Shore coastline, leaving few natural dune systems intact. As erosion worsens, the pressure to protect — and in some cases expand — existing development continues to grow, especially in densely populated areas near the shoreline.
The accelerating pace of coastal erosion and sea-level rise underscores an urgent need to explore managed retreat and other long-term adaptation strategies.
“You have this incredible problem with existing erosion,” Haydocy said. “The quote, unquote solutions or adaptations and attempts to protect the shoreline have only made the problem worse. And by the way, we have increasing levels of sea level rise and swell events that are only getting bigger and more severe.”
Rather than relying on hard defenses, the report points to “nature-based solutions” such as dune restoration, managed retreat and revegetation — strategies that restore the shoreline’s natural ability to absorb wave energy and recover from storms.
That approach underpins the North Shore Coastal Resilience Working Group 2.0, a partnership among the Surfrider Foundation, the University of Hawaii Sea Grant Program and SSFM International. The initiative brings together community voices to envision a future shoreline that adapts to change rather than resists it.
The process begins not with technical plans, but with conversation. “Just last month, (the group) hosted a community meeting with more than 80 local community members to restart conversations about what the future of the North Shore could look like,” Haydocy said. “That starts with having community conversations, where folks sit down and they look at maps and they point out the places that are most important to them and what they’d like to see protected.”
This bottom-up approach, she said, contrasts with the “check-the-box” consultation that too often defines coastal management elsewhere.
“One of the things that we see time and time again in terms of getting it wrong … is that community consultation is seen as a box to check, rather than incorporated as a part of the process from the outset,” Haydocy said. “Rather than saying, ‘Here’s an array of possible options, pick one,’ we want to know what’s most important to the community before engaging in that process.”
Shaping state action
The working group’s earlier recommendations already have shaped state action. In 2024, the state Legislature appropriated $1 million to fund a North Shore Beach Management Plan — a direct outcome of the group’s initial report. Haydocy called it a powerful example of community-led planning driving state-level investment.
“We have a federal administration that has withdrawn from a lot of climate and coastal resilience work, but that is really where states and local communities have been stepping in,” she said.
Under the previous administration, the U.S. saw “the largest ever federal investment in climate resilience,” Haydocy noted, through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
But recent budget proposals have sought to cut core programs within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that fund coastal adaptation nationwide.
The Trump administration’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget calls for a 27% reduction in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s funding, cutting roughly $1.7 billion. A key target in the plan is the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which oversees NOAA’s climate, weather and ocean laboratories as well as cooperative research institutes.
The proposal also would eliminate grants for the Coastal Zone Management Program, which helps states manage their own shoreline and coastal initiatives. Over the years, these grants have supported efforts to develop shoreline protection plans, address local coastal hazards, restore degraded habitats, build storm-resilient recovery policies and provide guidance on sea level rise science.
While Congress has attempted to preserve funding, uncertainty has forced states and local groups to fill the gap.
“We’re seeing recommendations that are being made by local groups coming from the local community that’s translating to state level policy and funding,” she said. “And we’ve seen a clear example of that in Hawaii.”
Surfrider’s report compares Hawaii’s local initiatives with broader national trends — from a “polluter pay” law in New York to a statewide climate bond in California and new rules for nature-based shoreline stabilization in Oregon. What sets Hawaii apart, Haydocy said, is how deeply community leadership is embedded in every step.
For Hanna Lilley, Surfrider Hawaii’s regional manager, Hawaii’s challenge is as much about policy as it is about sentiment.
“Policy-wise we need trigger-based adaptation pathways to accommodate a moving shoreline,” Lilley said. “We also need to better support homeowners that are trying to do the right thing in the face of a moving shoreline by relocating their homes mauka. This is no one-size-fits-all scenario both in terms of shoreline dynamics and property owners and we need to allow for nuance in the management approach.”
Lilley said the next phase of resilience planning must focus on giving homeowners and communities clear, flexible pathways to adapt before crisis hits — not after.
The 2025 State of the Beach Report includes case studies from nine coastal regions, from Puerto Rico to Oregon, but Hawaii stands out for its urgency and innovation. The report’s section on Oahu — titled “Renewed Resilience” — notes that the North Shore’s cultural significance, economic value and fragile ecosystems make it one of the most consequential coastlines in the Pacific.
The stakes extend far beyond property lines: eroding beaches threaten public access, traditional practices, and local livelihoods tied to surf tourism, which generates more than $1 billion annually for Oahu’s economy, supporting nearly 10,000 local jobs, equivalent to 12% of Oahu’s visitor economy and nearly 5% statewide.
For Surfrider and its partners, the lesson from Hawaii is that resilience must begin with people, not projects.
“Mother Nature’s design is pretty stellar along our beaches and coastlines,” Haydocy said, “and so working with that, rather than against it, when we look at what types of solutions are out there — that’s really the lesson from Hawaii.”
Source: The Garden Island