SEEDS

Building disaster and climate resilient communities in India

Each year, climate-induced disasters endanger millions and cause significant loss of life and livelihoods. Losses experienced are almost 2.5 times higher than prescribed compensation rates, making recovery deeply challenging. Yet countries lack a systematic, inclusive, citizen-level mechanism to assess and respond to the full scale of loss and damage.

About the organisation

SEEDS works with disaster-affected and at-risk communities in a long-term, integrated way. Their work involves supporting communities in securing lives, infrastructure, providing clean water and healthcare, and implementing nature-based adaptation solutions. Beyond direct implementation, SEEDS strengthens the capacity of local community-based organizations and NGOs across India training them in disaster preparedness and response, combining skillsets to deliver programs more effectively and expand resilience-building efforts across vulnerable communities. They have been recognised with prestigious honours, including the United Nations Sasakawa Award for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Subhash Chandra Bose Aapda Prabandhan Puraskar 2021, a national award for excellence in disaster management. Since 1994, they have impacted 12 Mn+ people across India and South Asia.

SEEDS recognised that effective disaster response demands a fundamental change in the way of seeing and assessing loss. This conviction led to the development of Sunny Lives, an AI based tool that helps identify and prioritize most vulnerable neighbourhoods from potential disaster losses, and AKSHVI, a community-driven digital disaster wallet currently being prototyped, developed through the Ashoka ASPIRE programme that empowers disaster-affected families to self-report losses and claim agency in recovery. These technology tools are already helping communities in high risk areas across the country secure their livelihoods against frequent climate shocks.

In parallel, SEEDS is currently anchoring place-based disaster resilience work through a district pilot in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu. This sandbox brings together community capacity building with clear disaster response roles, scenario-based planning, parametric insurance, and granular weather-based information systems.

Dr. Manu Gupta
Co-Founder & Director
Ashoka Fellow

Headquarters: India
Geographies: India & Parts of South Asia
Domains:
Climate

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Journey of Exponential Change

While significant investment flows into relief and response, there remains a critical gap in pre-disaster resilience building. Institutional frameworks are particularly weak for communities facing disasters repeatedly, leaving them in perpetual recovery mode. SEEDS' analysis of India's disaster governance revealed a stark reality: existing structures focus almost entirely on post-disaster response, with a complete collapse of governance below the district level.

The Big Quest:
How can we orchestrate an ecosystem that enhances the disaster resilience of vulnerable households in 225 climate hotspots across India by 2030?

SEEDS is now developing a national blueprint for disaster resilience in India, exploring proximate governance models that restore community agency through timely access to information and resources, enabling households to prepare and protect themselves before disasters strike, not just recover after. A critical realization emerged: system orchestration doesn't mean doing all the work yourself; it means building an ecosystem to share it. While SEEDS continues their on-ground disaster response work, they are now also working to orchestrate the broader disaster resilience space, bringing together Disaster Management agencies at national and sub-national levels alongside an ecosystem of partners to drive systemic change at hyper-local level.