Hawaiʻi has officially become the first U.S. state to enact a so-called “green fee” — a charge added onto hotel room stays and other short-term visits to help protect the local environment and address the growing impacts of climate change.

Gov. Josh Green signed the fee into law Tuesday after years of unsuccessfully urging the Legislature to pass it. Set to take effect next year, the fee could raise around $100 million annually, state officials estimate, a portion of which will go toward Hawaiʻi’s response to future disasters similar to the 2023 Lahaina wildfire.

“Hawaiʻi’s doing what other states and other nations are going to have to do … there will be no way to deal with these crises without some forward-thinking mechanism,” Green said moments before signing the bill.

“I hope that the world is watching,” he added, “because having something that is a balance between industry and environment is going to be the way to go forward to protect your people, to protect your states, to protect your economy.”

Specifically, the revenue will come from a .75% increase on the tax Hawaiʻi visitors pay on their nightly hotel and short-term stays. The uptick raises the state’s transient accommodations tax, or TAT, to 10%. Visitors already pay an additional 3% TAT on their stays to the counties.

That will translate to visitors paying about $3 extra, Green said, on a $400 room stay.

Overall, the move aims to make Hawaiʻi’s reefs, beaches, trails, mountains and other unique yet vulnerable environments more resilient to heavier storms, more severe droughts and other challenges linked to the changing climate.

It also seeks to avoid making locals pay the entire price of that damage. Green and other supporters say the fee on hotel stays, cruise ship cabins and short-term rentals is justified because of the link between the nearly 10 million visitors who fly to Hawaiʻi each year and the island state’s climate change and environment issues.

The fee proposal has previously gotten plenty of pushback from some local short-term rental owners and the hotel industry, who worry visitors will choose to go elsewhere if fees on their Hawaiʻi stays climb too high.

On Tuesday, however, key members of the local hotel industry attended the bill’s signing ceremony in a strong show of support. While they’re still worried about a drop in visits, they said the need to restore Hawaiʻi’s eroding beaches and remove invasive species has grown more urgent to keep those visitors coming.

“We need the money to restore those beaches, to reconstruct them, to take care of invasive plants that are around our hotels and around residences,” Hawaiʻi Hotel Alliance President Jerry Gibson said. “So we went from one end of the spectrum, you know, almost to the other.”

After extended talks with Green, Outrigger Hotels and Resorts President Jeff Wagoner said local industry leaders felt assured enough that the tax charged to their visitors would go to those projects.

While state leaders and conservation groups have general ideas about where to deploy the green fee, exactly how the money will be spent — and which local groups and agencies it will benefit — hasn’t been set.

Green said Tuesday a process to review and select projects should start in the fall ahead of the first fee collections in January.

The Legislature will also have a say in where the money goes. That’s because in an unusual move the fee will be routed to the state’s general fund instead of a special fund. Green downplayed concerns Tuesday that the arrangement could lead some green fee dollars to be spent on other purposes.

“We will actually sit around together and come up with a list of what to spend,” he said. State agency heads and the state’s new fire marshall will have a say, he added, in where the dollars go.

The need for a dedicated source of climate and conservation revenue has received strong support from numerous local conservation organizations.

A coalition of those groups, Care For ʻĀina Now, presented a study earlier this year showing an annual conservation funding gap of at least $560 million for Hawaiʻi. That gap could be as large as $1.69 billion based on the worst-case scenario, according to the study.

Some of the annual green fee collections, Green has said, can further be leveraged to float bonds that that might cover larger and more expensive projects in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

After the fee proposal failed to pass last year, Green assembled a “Climate Advisory Team” in part to lobby lawmakers to get it approved.

That team, called the “CAT” for short, interviewed more than 60 individuals from state and county agencies, nonprofits, businesses, and industries to better understand Hawaiʻi’s vulnerabilities to storms and other climate-related events, said Chris Benjamin, the group’s chair.

“Our goal was not about slowing climate change — even though that’s a very important goal,” Benjamin said Tuesday. “Our goal was to try to acknowledge that Hawaiʻi is vulnerable and try to find ways to make us less vulnerable.”

Prior ideas for collecting the green fee included charging visitors an arrival fee when they land at the airport or charging them a park-usage fee they could pay through their cell phones. However, lawmakers questioned how those proposals would work and be enforced, and opponents questioned whether they were even legal.

Other prior proposals included using interest generated from the state’s rainy-day fund or collecting a one-time fee for visitors to access scenic hikes, visit popular beaches, check into hotels, rent cars or participate in other tourism-related activities.

This year, the Legislature found that increasing the TAT would be the simplest way to go — and that approach managed to make Hawaiʻi the first state in the nation to approve a green fee. It emulates similar green fees passed on the national level by Palau, New Zealand and other visitor-popular destinations.

Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change is supported by The Healy Foundation, Marisla Fund of the Hawai‘i Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.