The canary in the coal mine: Understanding climate change through the language of “sea attacks” in Kochi’s urban fisher communities

In India's urban coasts, fisher communities experience climate change through sea attacks—powerful wave events that disrupt livelihoods and destroy homes. This paper examines how Kochi's urban fishers articulate environmental change through experiential knowledge, contrasting this with their systematic absence from the scientific literature on coastal hazards. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with women from fisher communities (2020-2024) and a systematic review of scientific papers on Indian coastal hazards, this research engages science and technology studies and the epistemic communities framework to reveal a structural disconnect between lived experience and scientific discourse. Coastal and climate scientists share disciplinary commitments to instrumental observation, model-based prediction, and credentialed expertise that structurally exclude community knowledge. Analysis identifies five mechanisms through which this exclusion operates: complete erasure of pre-1990 events from datasets; epistemological stripping that documents community action but erases its expertise; selective visibility that records physical phenomena but ignores community forecasting practices; parallel epistemologies that describe the same events through divergent frameworks; and gendered invisibility that doubly marginalizes women's environmental expertise. Sea attacks embody a complex understanding of compound environmental events that scientific frameworks disaggregate. Community narratives reveal detailed ecological knowledge—experiential and observational, transmitted through relational idioms but separable from them—that guides practical responses. These exclusion mechanisms do not merely produce epistemic injustice; they produce science that governance relies upon, but that cannot anticipate the hazards communities already navigate. Bridging community and scientific knowledge is a precondition for effective and just climate adaptation at the urban-ocean interface.