Abstract: In ‘Sustainable Development of Little Andaman - Vision Document’ NITI Aayog proposed a development plan for Little Andaman of Andaman and Nicobar Island group to build a greenfield coastal megacity as a free trade zone to compete with Hong Kong and Singapore. The plan needs 240 sq km from the east and west coast of the island that is 30% of the total area out of 680 sq km of the island comprises of 95% forest area most of that is evergreen forest [1][2]. Due to the closeness of the island to the Malacca Strait, an important world shipping route, also having 53683.10 Sq km Exclusive Economic Zone ( EEZ ) and potentiality for medical and natural tourism the vision is very much significant for blue wealth of the nation [3]. Among the different environmental impact one of them will be carbon stock losses as more than 2 million trees will be uprooted from the pristine forest. This study aims to forecast the carbon stock losses that will be helpful for environment impact assessment, NITIAayog yet not published. For the study area land use and land cover (LU/LC) data set was created from Bhuvan thematic satellite data. LU/LC multi-temporal satellite data from Resourcesat-2, LISS-III sensor of 2015-16 with a scale of 1:50,000 have been used in this study. Another data set for carbon stock of four forest type groups viz. Tropical Wet Evergreen, Tropical Semi Evergreen, Tropical Moist Deciduous and Littoral & Swamp forests in Andaman and Nicobar Island was prepared from India State of Forest Report (ISFR) 2019. From this two data set total carbon stock loss for the study area was calculated. QGIS a open source s/w was used for various data operations.
Keywords: Carbon Stock, Little Andaman, Land use and Land Cover, Bhuvan -Indian Geo-platform
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DOI:
10.17148/IJARCCE.2022.11336
