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How it works · Baselines

Federal statistics, brought home to your moku.

Island baselines are public statistics — agriculture, water, energy, employment, demographics — drawn from federal sources through Google Data Commons and placed on the map of Hawaiʻi's 33 moku. They give every district a starting picture organized by stewardship pillar, while being honest about a real limit: federal data comes at the county level, which in Hawaiʻi often means a whole island.

Back to LearnHow research sharpens them

Seven pillars, aligned to the SDGs

Each baseline variable is filed under one of seven stewardship pillars, and each pillar maps to a UN Sustainable Development Goal — so a statistic always arrives with a stewardship context attached.

Food systemsSDG 2
Water resourcesSDG 6
EnergySDG 7
Economic developmentSDG 8
Sustainable communitiesSDG 11
Climate actionSDG 13
Land ecosystemsSDG 15

Where the numbers come from

Baselines are not collected by Mokunet. They are official statistical variables pulled from authoritative federal programs through Google Data Commons.

USDA Agriculture Census

Farm count and area · county · 5-year

NOAA

Rainfall, temperature, hazards · county · monthly

EIA

Energy generation · state · annual

BLS

Unemployment · county · monthly

ACS

Income, poverty, population · county · annual

UN SDG

Forest area, marine protected areas · national

From a federal table to a moku

Every baseline follows the same three steps to reach a district.

1
Pull from Data Commons
Official statistical variables are pulled for Hawaiʻi at the finest resolution each federal source publishes.
2
Place on the map
County figures are placed on the shared map, down to the moku that fall within each county.
3
Group by pillar
Each variable is organized under one of seven stewardship pillars and its associated SDG code for context.

The honest limit: these labels are our judgment

This is the most important thing to understand about baselines.

County-level statistics give useful context, but placing a county figure on a specific moku is an approximation, and labeling that figure with an SDG goal is an editorial call — a reasonable label, not a measured fact about that district. A few indicators (such as disaster preparedness, from the UH Mānoa Quality-of-Life survey) do have real county breakdowns; most are statewide averages shown for context.
Baselines are the floor, not the measurement. Real SDG measurement — a claim you can trace through specific records, sites, and the moku that holds them — takes locally contributed research. That is exactly what the Research Commons provides: moku-level indicators and field observations that sharpen these federal baselines from island level down to the district.
Baselines give every moku a starting picture from authoritative public data; observations and indicators sharpen it; the standards frame what the numbers mean. Together they let a district see where it stands and measure where it is going.