KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS forest inventory, but it is far better than the planting photographs that pass for evidence today. Q. Why would a corporate pay for this rather than plant its own trees? A. Because a survival-audited grove is worth far more to its ESG and carbon reporting than an unverified planting count, and producing that audit itself is costly. The program’s persistence check is the product the corporate is really buying, defensible green-cover data with its name on it. What would make this program fail Green Kerala fails if survival verification proves unreliable, if re-imaging cannot reliably distinguish a thriving sapling from a replaced or misrepresented one, or if planters learn to defeat the geotag-andbaseline check. Then the survival figure becomes as hollow as the planting count it replaced, and the audited register loses the credibility that was its entire value. The defences are the registrationbaseline imagery, species-and-size consistency across windows, and satellite cross-checks at corridor scale; if these prove insufficient in the pilot, the verification must be strengthened before the program is sold to a single carbon sponsor. Its subtler failure is optimising for survivable-butwrong trees: hardy exotics that tick the survival box while delivering little ecological value. This is why 198