ABSTRACT
The 2018 floods had devastating impacts on the local population, infrastructure development and economic structure in Kerala, India. The chapter uses a Migration as Adaptation lens to explore the impacts of sudden-onset natural disasters on migration in a climate-vulnerable geography dependent on multiple forms of labour migration to sustain its economy. This yields the question: to what extent can Kerala transform migration into an adaptation strategy? Although Migration as Adaptation helped offset development costs in post-disaster Kerala, the 2018 floods demonstrate the unequal and disadvantaging impacts of remittance-dependent economies, which indicate that migration cannot be a stand-alone adaptation strategy.
