Hello. We're SUSTERA.

Climate change arrived a while ago, and it has a Kerala address.

In 2018 the floods reached 5.4 million people in Kerala — one in six of us. In July 2024 a hillside in Wayanad came down at two in the morning; close to 300 people died and more than 200 were never found. And this is now normal weather. In 2025 India recorded an extreme weather event with flood, heatwave, lightning, cloudburst, take your pick — on 99% of the days in the first nine months of the year, and 4,064 people died in them. Kerala is no bystander in that count: the year before, it was one of only three states that added 40 or more extreme weather days in a single year.

You cannot argue a river back into its banks. What you can do is be ready for it. Readiness is the one part of this we still get to choose — and it is the whole of our job.

So: we train young people who want into climate work and can't find the door. We work with panchayats, departments and institutions, because that is where the budgets, the drains and the disaster plans actually live. And when a project ends, we try to leave a local organisation standing that can keep it running without us. Nine years, sixteen cohorts, four states, and a stubborn preference for staying.

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See our work →

What we did, where, with whom, and what it cost, including the parts that did not work.

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Support us →

Panchayat, company, college, or one person with a free Saturday. There is a door for each.

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Every year the climate gets louder. Every year the response stays about the same size. India's climate problem is not a shortage of urgency — it is a shortage of trained people standing close enough to the problem to do something about it. That is the gap we work in.

The numbers, and where they come from

By the numbers

The full breakdown, programme by programme, is on the Impact page.

Who we are

SUSTERA Foundation was registered in Kerala in 2017 by Sanju Soman and Deepa Ananthapadmanabhan, around a question that is easy to ask and hard to answer: what would it take for a place to run its own climate response — not a project delivered to it, but one it owns?

Nine years later the answer has not changed much. Trained people who actually live there. Women's collectives with money moving through them. Panchayat plans that survive a transfer of officers. And an organisation willing to stay through the second and third year, after the inauguration photographs are done.

Read our story → · Meet the team →

How we work

Four things, in a loop. Everything else on this site is one of them.

TRAIN

Climate work taught as a job you can actually do. Sixteen cohorts, 320+ people — students, panchayat staff and working professionals.

ACT

Adaptation in real wards, with real budgets, on a two-year clock instead of a two-week one.

FUND

We move money to the frontline small grants, women's enterprises, household support.

INFLUENCE

We write down what happened, including what failed, as handbooks and reports a panchayat secretary can use on a Monday morning.