What is the name of your organization?
EQUINOCT Community Sourced Modelling Solutions
What is the name of your solution?
SeaSight Flood Solutions
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
SeaSight is a community-powered decision support system for coastal flood solutions combining tech with indigenous knowledge and insights.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Ernakulam, Kerala, India
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
India
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Rising sea levels pose an existential threat to over a billion coastal dwellers globally. Permanent inundation, flooding, erosion, wetland loss, saltwater intrusion, and drainage failure are reshaping coastal regions. Small Island Nations, India, and China are particularly hard-hit, with saltwater intrusion destroying infrastructure, reducing agricultural yields, and collapsing livelihoods. In India’s densely populated coastal tracts, these chronic impacts are rapidly rendering vast areas uninhabitable, displacing millions and eroding economic stability. Kerala’s 590 km coastline, with a staggering density of 2,500 persons/sq.km, is in crisis. In Ernakulam district alone, 25 local governments and 100,000 people are on the frontlines of a warming, rising Indian Ocean. Over the past 20 years, sea levels here have surged by 30 cm—triple the global average—resulting in high tides reaching 100 cm above mean sea level (threefold as compared to the rise in sea level). Resultant saltwater intrusion is contaminating freshwater resources, exacerbating public health risks, and threatening local livelihoods.
Despite the scale of this disaster, tropical coasts lack systematic assessments or decision-support frameworks to mitigate or adapt to these devastating impacts of climate change. This neglect leaves vulnerable populations exposed, amplifying the urgency for targeted, science-based interventions.
What is your solution?
SeaSight, a community co-created web application, offers impact-based tidal flood forecasting and decision support. It predicts tidal patterns, monitors real-time levels, and assesses the impacts on infrastructure, agriculture, and aquaculture, enabling evaluation of adaptation measures. This tool aims to provide crucial science-based interventions for vulnerable tropical coastal populations.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
The increased uncertainty of high-tide floods has disrupted estuarine life and livelihoods in the coastal villages of Ernakulam district in Kerala state, South India. These coastal villages experience regular and frequent inundation with saltwater, often occurring two to three times daily for 4-5 days around the new and full moon phases, at fortnightly intervals, for nearly 8 months a year. This persistent flooding has compromised the structural stability and safety of houses, made house yards slippery and inaccessible, corroded household assets and possessions, and destroyed homestead agriculture and local biodiversity. It has contaminated freshwater sources, clogged sewage and septic systems, contributed to increased physical and mental illnesses, and severely degraded the quality of life in these coastal areas.
SeaSight, currently developed for the Ernakulam coastal villages, directly benefits 100,000 people. Impact-Based Forecasting (IBF), bridges the gap between science and action by predicting hazard-specific risks. Existing warnings fail to distinguish between tidal flooding, sea surges, and other hazards, leaving vulnerable communities unprepared. Our platform uniquely integrates IBF with community co-creation to enhance daily planning, emergency preparedness, and adaptation strategies. The product is currently offered to the local self governments along with the affected community and delivered as an open web-application.
