Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Munroe Island, Kerala’s fastest sinking inhabited landscape, faces daily tidal submergence, mobility loss and displacement. Using ethnography and political ecology, this study examines lived climate precarity, uneven tourism benefits, and the slow violence eroding land, livelihoods and hope.

Paper long abstract

Munroe Island in Kerala—India’s fastest sinking inhabited landscape—offers a critical site to examine how climate change, development, and governance intersect to shape everyday life. Once home to nearly 15,000 people, the population has reduced by almost half due to accelerating ecological degradation. Since the 2005 tsunami, tidal rhythms have transformed from bi-monthly to bi-daily inundations, submerging roads, homes, and livelihoods for hours each day. As a fragile cluster of eight interlinked islands, Munroe resists singular policy interventions; impacts are uneven, governance fragmented, and solutions partial at best.

This paper proposes an ethnographic study of Munroe Island to foreground lived experiences of climate precarity—focusing on mobility loss, disrupted education, health emergencies, asset devaluation, and everyday negotiations with fear, water, and uncertainty. Through long-term participant observation, in-depth interviews with residents across age, gender, and occupation, and participatory mapping of disappearing infrastructures, the research captures how climate change is experienced not as an event, but as an ongoing condition.

The study is theoretically grounded in Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, political ecology, and infrastructure studies, to analyse how environmental degradation, tourism-led development, and state inaction produce unequal vulnerabilities. While tourism has rebranded Munroe as a scenic destination, benefits remain concentrated among affluent resorts, intensifying local marginalisation.

By centring voices from a sinking archipelago, this research argues for climate justice approaches that recognise everyday suffering, spatial unevenness, and the limits of one-size-fits-all adaptation policies—before Munroe’s land, memory, and future are irreversibly submerged.