Project KERST
Kerala is one of India's most climate-exposed states. Situated between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats, it receives among the highest monsoon rainfall in the country, and that geography makes it structurally prone to floods, landslides, and coastal erosion. The 2018 floods displaced over five million people and caused damage estimated at over USD 3 billion. The Wayanad landslides of July 2024 killed over 350 people in a single district in a single day. A 2024 study confirmed that the rainfall which triggered those landslides was made more intense by human-induced climate change.
Yet Kerala also has climate commitments on paper: a State Action Plan on Climate Change, a Coastal Zone Management Authority, local climate action plans prepared across hundreds of local bodies. The question Project KERST asks is not whether the instruments exist. It is whether they are working, and for whom.
The Indo-Dutch Research Centre approaches this from the ground up, through three connected lines of inquiry, each of which feeds into what the Centre ultimately wants to build.
Lines of Inquiry
Kerala has climate frameworks across multiple areas, but they largely operate in silos, separated by departmental boundaries. We examine what the legal instruments actually enable, where they fragment across disaster management, coastal regulation, land use, and local governance, and whether they are designed to deliver real resilience or to simply record intent.
Consultation is not the same as co-production. Kerala's climate plans involve communities, but communities are rarely the authors of the plans that govern their futures. We listen to coastal fisherfolk, Adivasi communities, and others facing climate pressures firsthand, to understand whether community knowledge is entering planning systems or stopping at the door.
The Dutch experience with water, long-term adaptive planning, and multi-level governance offers lessons worth examining. But this exchange runs both ways. Kerala's tradition of decentralised community planning represents forms of participatory governance that the Dutch system can genuinely learn from. KERST treats the bilateral relationship as a two-way street.
Research Design
2026 to 2027 · Underway
Four tracks running simultaneously: a youth-led filmography competition documenting climate change in communities across Kerala; a legal and policy audit of Kerala's climate frameworks; outreach to organisations already working in climate adaptation and local governance in Kerala; and the opening of the Indo-Dutch dialogue through a scoping workshop at Leiden.
2027 to 2028
The knowledge from Phase 1 feeds into a process of genuine co-production. The central output is a Kerala Climate Resilience Framework, developed jointly with community knowledge holders, local governance actors, and both institutions. Not authored by researchers alone.
2028 to 2029
A structured capacity building programme for those who shape and implement climate planning: Grama Sabha members, Kudumbashree network leaders, fisher and Adivasi community representatives, LSGD officers, and KSDMA officials. Designed to outlast the research cycle and become an institutional resource the IDRC and GLC can maintain.
Where It Begins
Phase 1 begins not with researchers, but with young people. The Centre has launched a filmography and policy analysis competition inviting students to document what climate change looks and feels like in communities across Kerala. These films and accounts form the first layer of the Community Knowledge Base that grounds the research.
Competition DetailsOutput
The goal is not just to answer the question. It is to produce something that can be used.