KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS year later. Households, schools, and groups will plant and tend native trees, restore degraded patches, and maintain green cover, but only the planting is visible, so saplings die unmourned and the headline count means little. The entire value of the engine here is that it can reward persistence rather than the moment of planting. A tree that is alive next monsoon earns more than a tree that was photographed once and forgotten. This is the same persistence mechanism as Water Secure, applied to canopy instead of aquifer. The credibility this produces is worth as much as the trees. Green-cover and carbon claims are increasingly scrutinised, and a planting count is exactly the kind of evidence that does not survive scrutiny, because it measures intention rather than result. A survival-audited register, the same plot, reimaged across seasons, with species and size checked against a baseline, is evidence that does survive scrutiny, and is therefore fundable in ways a planting photograph is not. The persistence check is simultaneously the thing that grows real canopy and the thing that makes the canopy’s existence provable to anyone who needs to report it. 189