Future Mangrove Suitability Assessment of Andaman to strengthen sustainable development

Islands are threatened by various natural and anthropogenic factors including climate change, overpopulation, unsustainable use of natural resources and increasing trend in seismic events. Therefore, studies on island in specific aspect (ecological, social and economic) is very essential for sustainable resource management and future development. Mangroves are highly important natural resources of coastal regions in respect to coastal livelihood and natural defense. Although, around 46% of the mangrove forest area has vanished worldwide in the last few decades. In this present research, Future Mangrove Suitability Index (FMSI) using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method has been performed for sustainable forest management under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal no 15. It is a new framework applied on North and Middle Andaman Island to determine the future distribution of mangrove forest. Land-use and land-covers (LULC) are prepared in supervised classification (maximum likelihood algorithm) techniques with 3000 signatures. A total number of fourteen parameters has been used in multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) platform to generate future scenarios. Among them, Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) projected climatic data (RCP 6.0 scenario shows the best result comparing to 4.5 and 8.5) and projected population data has been used for the first time in the investigated area. The final results are validated using 556 field sample point. Seven major sensitive parameters have been selected from sensitivity analysis and three statistical correlation analysis has been performed using 300 field points to generate the actual correlation between the parameters. The final outcome shows that major unsuitable zones are located in Diglipur tehsil whereas; highest suitable zones are located in Rangat tehsil region which are the result of the continuous increase of sea surface height (1.5 mm observed during 1980–2009), seismic events with frequent storm surges, anthropogenic influences and impact of climate change. Thus a planned sustainable development practice is essential to control the biodiversity loss and future livelihood management. Moreover, this study will strengthen future planning projects and researches in mangrove ecosystem management of Andaman.