The University of Hawaii at Hilo is launching an academy that seeks to train students and professionals about climate change solutions and sustainability, with a focus on incorporating Indigenous values and knowledge, officials announced in March.
The Applied Life-Science Academy: Knowledge Advancing Industry program, also known by the acronym ALAKA‘I, will begin offering one-week training sessions at UH Hilo in July. The courses will focus on the bioeconomy, which includes the production of renewable fuel, energy, chemicals and other materials using alternative sources rather than fossil fuels. University officials say it is a big step in helping to grow a more sustainable community and way of life, pointing out that Hawaii can be at the forefront of finding solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions locally and nationally.
“We need to better understand what sustainability means, and we need to better understand how we get there,” said Peter Matlock, the program’s lead investigator, who also teaches a tropical bioeconomy class at UH Hilo. “We need good guiding principles for sustainability because we have these major challenges ahead of us for resolving climate change and for doing so in a way that enables people to maintain and improve their standards of living.”
The new academy is a partnership with UH Hilo’s College of Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resource Management, the nonprofit BioMADE and the National Corn-to-Ethanol Research Center at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The goal is to train students and industry professionals, such as operators, technicians and scientists, in the bioeconomy.
In addition to this summer, Matlock said they plan to offer more training in summer 2023, with the first two years being trial runs and offered for free. He said they hope to add more sessions in the following years and open them up to more people.
Angela Fa’anunu, assistant professor of sustainable tourism at UH Hilo and co-principal investigator of the ALAKA‘I program, said it’s important to have diverse perspectives, particularly when trying to find solutions to longstanding, complex issues. She is leading the development of curriculum that will focus on Native Hawaiian and Pacific Island cultural perspectives and knowledge and how that can be used to help advance sustainability.
Fa’anunu, who grew up on a small island in Tonga, said she plans to gather a hui of practitioners from different backgrounds to provide guidance in developing this curriculum. Pacific Island communities have evolved from small island systems with limited resources, so she said those values and ways of life can provide many lessons on how to live resiliently and adapt to the environment.
“The idea is to offer alternative perspectives. In Hawaii and the Pacific Islands, we’re very land-based societies. We relate to our natural resources and people in different ways,” Fa’anunu said. “In the islands, there’s a strong sense of kuleana to take care of place. I think we’re well positioned in Hilo to host this kind of academy.”
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Jayna Omaye covers ethnic and cultural affairs and is a corps member of Report for America, a national service organization that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.
