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How it works · Baselines

Federal statistics, placed onto the moku backbone.

Island baselines are public statistics — agriculture, water, energy, employment, demographics — drawn from federal sources through Google Data Commons and mapped onto Hawai'i's 33 moku districts. They give every district a starting picture organized by stewardship pillar, while being honest about a real limit: federal data resolves to the county, which in Hawai'i 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 verified 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
Verified statistical variables are pulled for Hawai'i at the finest resolution each federal source publishes.
2
Map to the backbone
County figures are mapped through the spatial backbone to the moku districts 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: editorial SDG alignment

This is the most important thing to understand about baselines.

County-resolution statistics give useful context, but mapping a county figure onto a specific moku is an approximation, and tagging that figure to an SDG is an editorial judgment — a reasonable label, not a measured fact about that district. A few indicators (such as disaster preparedness, from the UH Manoa Quality-of-Life survey) do have real county breakdowns; most are statewide averages shown for context.
Baselines are the floor, not the measurement. Graph-grounded SDG measurement — a claim traceable through specific records, sites, and the moku that contains them — requires locally contributed research. That is exactly what the Research Commons provides: sub-county indicators and field observations that refine these federal baselines from island resolution 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.