The Hawai`i Stream Assessment: Report with a Mission

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In 1988, the Hawai`i Legislature asked the Commission on Water Resource Management to study Hawai`i’s streams, with an eye to identifying those that “appropriately may be placed within a wild and scenic river system, to be preserved and protected as part of the public trust.”

The result was formation of the Hawai`i Stream Assessment project. After two years of work, it has completed a 300-plus-page draft report.

HSA’s work is worth mentioning for several reasons. First, although it is not one of the elements listed by statute in the Hawai`i Water Plan, it is a far more thorough treatment of the subject of Hawai`i’s surface water than that contained in the plan itself — specifically, in the Water Resources Protection Plan. In fact, the WRPP admits a lack of information in the area of surface water resources, and ends with a call for a study very similar to that undertaken by the HSA. If the HSA were made formally a part of the Hawai`i Water Plan — something suggested in the “umbrella” document — it would be a much stronger, complete document.

Second, the way in which the HSA was conducted is in striking contrast to the way in which the HWP elements were developed. The HSA was a cooperative project, based on a methodology developed by the National Park Service. A study team, working under contract with the Department of Land and Natural Resources, sought out scientists and other knowledgeable experts and assembled teams to inventory Hawai`i’s streams and their physical characteristics and to study stream resources in four fields: aquatic, riparian, cultural and recreational. The Nature Conservancy of Hawai`i was contracted to do a search of biological studies for native and introduced species occurrence. Maps and a computerized stream database are other products of the HSA that should be of help planners, researchers and environmentalists concerned with stream resources for years to come.

The HSA report will benefit from public review, as all such documents do. Still, its genesis makes it unlikely that the boners that are found in elements of the HWP will surface during the public comment period.

Finally, and most important, in contrast to the HWP, the HSA has a clear idea of mission: to protect Hawai`i’s stream resources and to gather, in useful fashion, every scintilla of information that might help decision-makers and policy-makers achieve that end.

Among the major findings in the draft report is the strong correlation between stream size and associated stream resources. Although Hawai`i has many perennial streams — 376 of them — those that are large and free-flowing are precious and few. One of the most important findings is that, owing to their relatively short length, streams in Hawai`i don’t lend themselves to sectional management. What happens to a stream at any point can have repercussions upstream and down.

Recommendations are not in final form, so it is premature to discuss them. But both in structure and in substance, the approach of the HSA has been exemplary.

Volume 1, Number 2 August 1990