KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS THE ADJACENT BENEFIT Living urban canopy lowers heat and raises property and tourism value; verified survival gives the state credible evidence for carbon and greencover reporting that planting-day photographs never could. Which is increasingly fundable. How we would know it is working The single metric that defines this program is verified twelve-month survival rate, by plot, ward, and institution, not planting count, which the program treats as a vanity number. A school that planted a hundred saplings and kept ninety alive outranks one that planted a thousand and kept two hundred, and the leaderboard says so. Survival, reimaged at the same geotagged location across seasons, is the behaviour the program rewards and therefore the behaviour it measures. Two checks give the survival figure authority. The first is the native-species share of survived plantings, because a monoculture of hardy exotics is not the green cover the state wants; the metric is weighted toward appropriate native species. The second is the external cross-check against satellite green-cover indices where available, so the groundlevel survival register can be validated against remote sensing at the corridor scale. Together these make the program’s green-cover claims defensible 194