Josh Stanbro is the Chief Resilience Officer and Executive Director for the City and County of Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency.grew up in Round Mountain, California, attended Montgomery Creek Elementary School and lost his home in the Fountain Fire in 1992. He graduated from Claremont McKenna College before he earned a law degree from Berkeley Law. He served as Environment and Sustainability Program Director for the Hawai‘i Community Foundation (HCF) from 2009-2017, where he led the Hawai‘i Fresh Water Initiative and the Hawai'i Environmental Funders Group. Previous to HCF, Josh headed The Trust for Public Land’s Hawai'i Office, where he worked with local communities to permanently protect over 25,000 acres and dedicate over $200 million in land conservation funds.
Honolulu published their O’ahu Resilience Strategy in January of 2019 after 18 months of intense involvement among grassroots residents and community leaders from the for-profit, nonprofit and governmental sectors. “The Resilience Office visited all 33 neighborhood boards on O’ahu, engaged with 219 organizations, and received direct survey input from more than 2,300 individuals representing a range of Honolulu’s geographical, ethnic, gender, and age diversity.”
The report includes a section on Climate Security: Tackling Climate Change by Reducing Emissions and Adapting to Impacts. They state, “The climate crisis is the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced, and as an island society we are facing the impacts first. The city must transition to a 100 percent clean energy economy, as rapidly as possible and begin changing policies and our infrastructure to protect lives and property that are increasingly in harm’s way.”
