Ahead of the 2025 legislative session, Care for ʻĀina Now is seeking a qualified conservation finance consultant to assess the state of conservation funding and financing gap in Hawaiʻi. The work will take place between October and December of 2024 to ensure the findings can be used to inform active policy-making efforts underway ahead of the 2025 legislative session.

Submit a proposal to aloha@careforainanow.org, including experience, proposed budget, timeline, and references by October 15th, 2024.

For more information and scope of work, visit the announcement website.

Background

In 2018, Conservation International and partners led an initial assessment of visitor green fee systems used around the world, and what policy parameters of these systems would best apply to a Hawai‘i visitor green fee system. Visitor green fees– or payments made by visitors to management authorities, for the explicit purpose of funding natural resource management– are an innovative conservation financing tool. In contrast to site-based fees, these conservation finance systems operate at the scale of an entire jurisdiction, rather than a specific protected area, park or reserve.1 The published report2 included an analysis that estimates the gap in conservation and natural resource management at approximately $358M USD per year in Hawai‘i. This analysis compiled existing funding to support conservation– from federal, state, private, and philanthropic funding sources– at $535M USD per year, and estimated the requirement for adequate conservation at $886M USD per year. Over the past several years, the Care for ʻĀina Now (CAN) coalition (formerly the Hawai‘i Green Fee coalition)– a coalition of residents, organizations, and community groups has been dedicated to supporting closing this ~$360M financing gap and increasing investment into our natural resources at a scale commensurate to the biodiversity and climate crises. The conservation financing gap estimate is more than 5 years old, and much has changed in Hawai‘i since this time, including the Covid-19 pandemic, the Maui wildfire tragedy, and other major events. As Governor Green has convened a Climate Action Team (CAT), there is a need to update this analysis to understand the full scope of what is needed financially to steward and restore our natural resources, and the best options– including a climate impact resilience fee– to fill the current financing gap.