In a major win for conservationists, Hawaiʻi is poised after years of debate to finally approve a so-called “green fee,” which would be paid mostly by visitors to help shield the island state from environmental harm and climate change.

House and Senate members on Friday approved the bill to create that fee during the last day of their pivotal conference hearings, in which the two chambers hash out their differences on bills behind closed doors and try to reach consensus.

A final vote to send the green fee measure to Gov. Josh Green, who strongly supports it, is expected next week.

“It’s a historic piece of legislation,” Green said Friday. “No other state has done something of this magnitude to have an impact fee that goes directly to deal with climate change.”

Under the bill, the transient-accommodations tax that visitors pay on their nightly hotel and short-term rental stays will increase by .75 percentage points, plus travelers who dock in Hawaiʻi on cruise ships will start paying that tax as well, to cover the new fee.

Green’s office has estimated the move would raise some $100 million annually. Those dollars would then be used to cover environmental projects across Hawaiʻi, along with efforts to make the state’s infrastructure and homes more resilient to natural disasters and the changing climate.

“When we started this, it was a wild moonshot of an idea. No one ever thought this was possible,” said Jack Kittinger, a leader with the Care for ʻĀina Now Coalition who’s spent the past seven years trying to get the green fee passed.

“When we started this, it was a wild moonshot of an idea.”

Jack Kittinger, a leader with the Care for ʻĀina Now Coalition

That stretch of time was marked, Kittinger noted, by a tourism boom, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and then the devastating Lahaina wildfire.

“These are all things that have happened over the last seven years that have been tremendous, landscape-level shifts in both the tourism sector but also the climate challenge,” Kittinger said. “Through all that, we built a coalition that made this something that, instead of a nice-to-have, became something about our survival.”

Need Is Great But So Is Opposition

Care For ʻĀina presented a study earlier this year showing an annual conservation funding gap of at least $560 million for Hawaiʻi. That gap could be as large as $1.69 billion based on the highest possible scenario, according to the study.

Hawaiʻi’s tourism industry, meanwhile, has opposed for years the tax hike on their customers, saying it might send visitors to other, cheaper vacation spots instead. Green fee advocates say the fee will help keep Hawaiʻi’s reefs, beaches, trails and other scenic destinations in robust shape to keep the tourists coming.

The bill, according to Green, would also create a fund devoted to paying for future disasters, including those caused by the islands’ changing climate. It comes nearly two years after the wildfire that destroyed Lahaina, on Maui, killing at least 102 people and causing an estimated $12 billion in damage.

The Legislature’s approval marks a big win for Green, who had campaigned on enacting such a fee and, when it repeatedly failed to pass, created a “Climate Advisory Team” to lobby lawmakers to get it done.

That team, called the “CAT” for short, interviewed more than 60 individuals from state and county agencies, nonprofits, businesses, and industries to better understand Hawaiʻi’s vulnerabilities to storms and other climate-related events, said Chris Benjamin, the group’s chair.

It further surveyed 600 local residents to get their take on Hawaiʻi’s climate issues. Benjamin said the group found “strong support” among those residents for increased spending to prepare for climate change impacts. Group members, he added, met with lawmakers during the past session.

How The Idea Evolved

Prior ideas for collecting the green fee included charging visitors an arrival fee when landing at the airport or charging them a “park-usage” fee paid through their phones. However, lawmakers questioned how those proposals would work and be enforced, and opponents questioned whether they were even legal.

Other prior proposals included using interest generated from the state’s rainy-day fund or collecting a one-time fee for visitors to access scenic hikes, visit popular beaches, check into hotels, rent cars or participate in other tourism-related activities.

This year, the Legislature found that increasing the TAT would be the simplest way to go, and identified a connection between the millions of tourists who visit each year and Hawaiʻi’s climate change and environment issues.

Kawika Riley, vice president of external affairs at the local environmental group KUPU and a member of the CAT, called the lawmakers’ move Friday a first, key step to “keep our communities safe, keep our environment beautiful and respond to the risks of a warming world.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change is supported by The Healy Foundation, Marisla Fund of the Hawai‘i Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.