Five Key Problems

Lahaina’s rebuilding challenge breaks down into five linked problems that reinforce one another across scale. The diagram distills that chain of risk into a single framework, while the page carries the explanatory text more clearly than the slide board did.

The five problems

1. Urban risk remains concentrated in exposed areas shaped by fire, flood, and sea level rise.
2. Weak coastal protection leaves Lahaina vulnerable to future shoreline erosion and storm impact.
3. Displacement and cultural erosion threaten the continuity of local community life and Native Hawaiian identity.
4. Lack of structure in the recovery process produces fragmented decision-making and uneven outcomes.
5. Disconnected top-down recovery weakens coordination between ecological systems, housing, infrastructure, and community-led rebuilding.

Why this matters

Together these problems justify a recovery strategy that works from regional systems down to site-scale interventions rather than treating rebuilding as a collection of isolated projects.