Great Nicobar’s Flawed Restoration Plan: Why Tree-Planting and Reef Relocation Won’t Save Its Ecosystem

Great Nicobar’s Flawed Restoration Plan: Why Tree-Planting and Reef Relocation Won’t Save Its Ecosystem

Trofim Lysenko was a radical plant biologist of the Soviet era. He was convinced that rational science should be used in the service of the state and that the purpose of the state was progress for all, and at all costs. Lysenko was convinced that his knowledge of plant inheritance could be deployed to feed the revolution. Rejecting bourgeois phantoms like the gene as just so much metaphysics designed to maintain class structures, he believed that crops, much like ideal Soviet citizens, could bend to the will of the state, with just the right environment and training. Within a few generations of careful Lamarckian engineering, any crop could become highly productive, helping fill vacant granaries across the republic.

It was a beautiful, transformative idea. Lysenkoism shaped official agricultural policy in the Soviet republic from the 1930s until the early 1950s, setting crop production targets for farmer collectives, who were directed to use its principles of “vernalisation” and vegetative hybridisation to double their yields. Farms unable to meet these targets were clearly tilled by unpatriotic or lazy farmers, unconvinced of the grand revolutionary project. Intellectual doubters were jailed or executed. Declining yields and near famines were not enough to shake Lysenkoism’s grip over the nation, and it spread to other socialist regimes, including China, where it contributed to the many devastations of the Great Leap Forward.

Also Read | Great Nicobar: Disaster in the making

It is not important here to retell the sorry saga of Lysenkoism since enough has been written about it earlier.¹ Yet, it is a sobering example of how a beautiful idea can capture, transform, and bring a nation to its knees. Lysenkoism was not merely a beautiful idea, of course. It was an ambitious ideology based on enlightenment thinking. It was an audacious experiment in ecological and social engineering. It was, eventually, an instrument of state making. And it had the misfortune of being almost wholly wrong.

But if misconceived ideas inevitably lead to ruin, well-conceived ones, misapplied, can do the same. Ecological restoration, the hopeful idea that we can reverse the trajectory of degrading habitats with careful ecological engineering, is one such. Unlike Lysenkoism, it has its intellectual foundations in sound principles of ecological theory. Under the right circumstances, and when done right, it has a proven track record of succeeding. It may be among our best chances of recouping losses in formerly disturbed or damaged natural ecosystems. Yet, when made to work in the service of an essentially ill-thought scheme, it becomes yet another disingenuous instrument of state making.

The deeply forested east coast of Great Nicobar island. Image clicked from a boat in the evening.
| Photo Credit:
Manish Chandi

Consider India’s plans for the island of Great Nicobar in the Indian Ocean. A major transshipment terminal together with an international airport and a brand new city are set to transform the region, dragging it into a world of untapped economic opportunity. The Union government’s plans for Great Nicobar, estimated to cost Rs.72,000 crore (recently revised upwards to more than Rs.81,800 crore), includes plans for a new port (for container transshipment), a new international airport, an entire new city, and a power plant.

The “pre-feasibility” report prepared by AECOM India Pvt. Ltd, a Haryana-based consultancy, for the Union’s think tank, NITI Aayog, indicated that “tourism facilities (hotels, resorts, dining, shopping, and entertainment) are to be developed within the urban centres up and down the coast”. Making all this a reality requires the bulldozing of large tracts of primary rainforest. The construction activity will have large and permanent impacts on coastal and marine systems. Local communities, including indigenous Nicobarese, will either be displaced or have their lands significantly modified.

“The EIA fails to account for the broader ecological impacts, including soil erosion and the loss of unique ecosystems like giant tree fern forests.”

Several incisive articles have critically examined the proposed development and drawn attention to the drastic impacts on ecology² and social justice,³ while raising questions on whether the projects are even economically viable⁴ or geopolitically necessary⁵ at all. Our purpose in this article is not to revisit or reiterate these aspects; instead, we examine, in the context of ecological impact, how the idea of restoration is being deployed to compensate for the planned destruction of forest and marine habitats.

The project proponents claim that all ecological impacts will be addressed with ambitious plans to offset the damage. Lost rainforest will be compensated with afforestation efforts elsewhere in India, and entire reefs will be salvaged and relocated safely away from the path of the planned destruction. It is our submission that, as marvellous as these measures may sound, they constitute a plan that rivals Lysenkoism in its inspired ecological hubris and represent a worrying trend in the developmental logic of the country.

Great Nicobar is the largest and southernmost island among the Nicobars of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago. The Nicobars are the only region within India to fall within the Sundaland global biodiversity hot spot, a recognition of its extraordinary biological richness, including numerous endemic species such as the rare Nicobar megapode, Nicobar tree shrew, cat snakes, tree frogs, and plants. One in three bird species and one in four plant species of Great Nicobar are found nowhere else in the world. The island remains clothed in dense forests from coastal mangroves to evergreen rainforests, and scientists continue to discover and describe new species with nearly every expedition. Below water too, this region borders the great Coral Triangle, home to more than 75 per cent of the world’s coral species, home to an astounding diversity of fish and marine invertebrates.

Tree ferns in the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve in 2006.
| Photo Credit:
Pankaj Sekhsaria

To the Great Nicobarese people, the island’s original inhabitants, the island is Patai Takaru, or “big island”. The Nicobarese have long lived alongside another indigenous community, the semi-nomadic and forest-dwelling Shompen, a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group numbering perhaps around 250 people. It is under the traditional ownership and conservation of these tribal communities that the island’s extraordinary forests and biological diversity have survived to the present day. While scientists and conservationists have raised the alarm at the impending ecological catastrophe about to befall the island, social scientists and human rights groups have warned against the impending human tragedy or “genocide” of the indigenes if the plans go through.

Recommendations for “restoring” rainforests, relocating reefs 

The environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the Great Nicobar project, carried out by Vimta Labs, concluded in March 2022. The environmental clearance granted in November 2022 mentioned several mitigation measures, including the creation of a leatherback turtle sanctuary on Little Nicobar, and a suite of measures to restore or compensate for lost rainforests and coral reefs. The project will destroy an estimated 13,075 hectares (ha) of pristine tropical rainforest, including 8,52,245 trees within the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve. This estimate is likely an underestimate as it relies on a limited survey by a consultant with no direct expertise in the Nicobars. A highly conservative extrapolation of rigorous tree density estimates done in 2003 by three leading Indian primatologists indicates⁶ that the true number of trees affected could be closer to 40 lakh trees (4 million), five times higher than the official figure.⁷ Of course, there is no way to be certain of the estimate until the details are released transparently, including maps of the area where tree felling will be carried out, number of plots surveyed, plot sizes and tree girths considered, and the results of enumeration.⁸

The government has proposed “green development” for some areas, reserving 15 per cent as green and open spaces, but such interventions are incompatible with the preservation of dense rainforests. The EIA fails to account for the broader ecological impacts, including soil erosion and the loss of unique ecosystems like giant tree fern forests. Nor does it consider other serious environmental harms such as large-scale soil erosion during logging affecting terrestrial, riverine, and marine ecosystems. It fails to recognise that deforestation of mature tropical rainforests can release as much as 650 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare, or over 4.3 million tonnes of CO₂ by deforesting 6,599 ha, which is equivalent to burning over 1.6 billion litres of diesel.

The Aravallis, where Great Nicobar’s rainforests are sought to be relocated, have a vastly different and drier ecosystem, with completely different forest types, biogeography, and evolutionary history.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images/ iStock

Against these losses, a truly Lysenkoist plan is being offered as a remedy. To offset the loss of Patai Takaru’s remarkable rainforests, the government plans to establish compensatory tree plantations in double the area in—rather unbelievably—the Aravallis of Haryana and a small part of Madhya Pradesh. The Haryana plans include the creation of a 10,000 acre “zoo safari” park.⁹ These plans ignore the fact that the Aravallis and central India are vastly different and drier ecosystems, with completely different forest types, ecologies, biogeography, and evolutionary history.

It is difficult to imagine how this can be regarded as compensating for the loss of the Nicobar rainforests. Furthermore, compensatory afforestation plantations in India have an abysmal track record, marked by monoculture plantations, use of alien species, poor survival, and wastage of land and public resources, as flagged by a Comptroller and Auditor General report¹⁰ as early as 2013 and in many studies since.¹¹

Below water, although no coral was found in Galathea Bay itself, reefs on the eastern flank might be impacted by dredging, with an estimated loss of 1-2 ha of reef from airport construction. To offset this, the report recommended relocating corals from 4 ha of reef to Laxman and Joginder Nagar beaches. This translocation, managed by the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI), involves moving 16,150 coral colonies. Of these, around 6,900 of the identified colonies belong to the dominant genus Acropora, around 8,000 are massive or submassive colonies, and the rest an assortment of other groups. The proposal is to use saws, chisels and drills to hack corals off the substrate before transporting them in water to the new/recovery site, where they will be fixed with epoxy and monitored for survival. The salvage operation will cost Rs.55 crore, and will be monitored for a decade.

How effective is ecological restoration as a conservation strategy?

Whether for coral reefs or for rainforests, it is useful to ask how legitimate these proposed solutions are. Given the rash of restoration efforts that abound, what do we know of their effectiveness? We will say upfront that, although we have been engaged with restoring rainforests and in coral reef conservation for the past 25 years, there are no straightforward answers. In this section, we briefly summarise the current state of knowledge of the restoration of rainforests and coral reefs in the hope that it will stimulate a reconsideration of the existing restoration proposals for Great Nicobar and help inform better mitigation measures.

Coral reefs in the Nicobar waters.
| Photo Credit:
Vardhan Patankar

Even if one assumes that the destroyed rainforests can be ecologically restored, how can one go about it and what are its chances of success? Within India, the Nicobars itself is biogeographically distinctive as part of the Sunda region and has generally excellent forest cover that is not in need of restorative interventions—they are best left alone. This itself indicates that there are virtually no opportunities for ecological restoration in the truest sense. In other words, if the forests are destroyed for this project on Great Nicobar, their loss will be complete, irreversible, and irreplaceable. It is precisely for this reason that the first and cardinal rule of the 10 golden rules for reforestation¹² states: Protect Existing Forest First.

Compared with the compensatory plan in the Aravallis, a somewhat more reasonable proposal for restoration could have targeted degraded areas in the Andaman Islands, on the logic of partial similarity with the Nicobars. This could have meant restoring areas such as the over 1,500 ha of failed oil palm plantation in Little Andaman or the extensively logged forest areas on many of the Andaman Islands. However, at present, the government plans only to revive oil palm¹³ rather than restore forests, and there is no coherent approach or policy to revive degraded logged forests or tackle invasive alien species on the islands.¹⁴

If ecological restoration is attempted, a spectrum of approaches can be used.¹⁵ This ranges from relatively passive ones (allowing forests to regenerate naturally with protection), to assisted forest regeneration (with interventions such as removal of choking weeds or adding bird perches as loci of seed dispersal to promote regeneration), to active and reconstructive restoration (involving more intensive work such as soil amendments, weed removal, and reintroduction of a high diversity of native species with planting and site maintenance over many years).

The choice of the appropriate method for any given degraded site involves many considerations, including understanding the causes that led to the degradation, the sites’ ecological history and land use, and the landscape context, geology, and soils. It requires pinpointing the original natural vegetation types, selecting appropriate benchmark sites (as relatively intact ecosystems to use as reference sites), and identifying diverse locally appropriate native species suitable for each site. A restoration approach based on these can be selected, deployed, and subjected to continuous or regular assessments and monitoring to aid in course corrections. What ecological restoration is certainly not is a mindless tree-planting exercise to re-establish green cover without consideration of the above aspects.

Natural regeneration may be a more meaningful strategy than more-interventional approaches in many large forest landscapes,¹⁶ especially where degraded sites are close to existing tracts of undisturbed forests.¹⁷ This may be the best approach to use in formerly logged forests that abut contiguous tracts in the Andamans. In more highly degraded sites, sites with poor natural regeneration, or in isolated forest fragments, active or reconstructive restoration could be undertaken. This would require dedicated surveys to identify sites, efforts such as the removal of invasive alien plants, creation of native plant nurseries with high diversity of native plant species characteristic of the islands’ forests, and subsequent site preparation, planting, and multi-year maintenance. In most cases where meaningful ecological restoration like this has been achieved in other parts of the world, it has been in the range of few hectares to tens of hectares, rather than over thousands of hectares as envisaged in the Lysenkoist plans behind the mega infrastructure project.

Schoolchildren, teachers and volunteers form the shape of a fish with a sad face alongside Chinese characters that read “Refrain” at Repulse Bay in Hong Kong on April 23, 2015.  The event was aimed at raising awareness about marine conservation. Coral reefs could vanish in as little as a decade, warned a landmark UN report by global experts in 2024.
| Photo Credit:
Bobby Yip/REUTERS

Even with such intensive efforts, only partial recovery can be achieved in complex ecosystems such as rainforests that have a large diversity of interacting species. Experiences from rainforest restoration in the Western Ghats indicate that forest attributes such as canopy cover, aboveground carbon storage, adult tree and sapling density and species density, and compositional similarity to relatively undisturbed benchmarks may increase by 14-82 per cent over a span of about 15 years.¹⁸ This suggests, as does research from other parts of the world, that tropical forest ecosystems may take over 100 years to recover to levels approaching those in undamaged forests, while some attributes including the return of rare and endemic species may take centuries¹⁹ or be irrecoverably lost forever.

Coral reef restoration–is it ever a meaningful solution?

While there is a long history of terrestrial restoration, the restoration of marine ecosystems is much more recent. In the past two decades, in the wake of rapidly declining coastal habitats, efforts at restoring mangroves, seagrass meadows, coral reefs, and algal forests have grown in scope and ambition. The results are decidedly mixed. This has not stopped agencies around the world from promoting marine restoration as the bright beacon of hope for marine conservation. Coral reef restoration efforts have burgeoned in recent times, with most using one of four broad approaches: relocation of adult coral, coral gardening in nurseries, the creation of artificial reefs, or the stabilisation of loose substrate. Among the more experimental approaches being explored are micro-fragmenting of massive corals that can then be used to “re-skin” dead colonies, and the creation of genetically modified super-coral to resist bleaching. Salvage operations such as the one the ZSI proposes represents a fifth of all recorded restoration projects.

So, are they effective? Well, a lot depends on what you mean by effectiveness. Most coral restoration projects measure their effectiveness by tracking the survivorship of coral—either young nursery transplants or translocated adults. According to published literature,²⁰ coral survival in restored areas can be as high as 70 per cent although the ZSI reports a 90 per cent survival rate for its own earlier projects.²¹ What is important to remember, however, is that most restoration projects for which we have reliable information have been monitored for less than two years, and measures of longer-term survivorship are much more difficult to come by. More often than not, after several years of successful restoration, restored corals die en masse when a major storm comes through or when an ocean warming event causes mass bleaching of coral. The majority of restoration projects use fast-growing branching species; while they are able to occupy reef areas quickly, they are also among the most vulnerable to disturbance.

Highlights

• If the forests are destroyed for the project on Great Nicobar, their loss will be complete, irreversible, and irreplaceable
• Regarding the plans for coral reef restoration, it must be underlined that translocating reefs does not constitute the restoration of the reef as a living ecosystem. It does not guarantee that the integrity and health of the reef
• Besides, it is doubtful whether any amount of restoration would be meaningful in the face of increasing heat stress in a bleaching hot spot like the Nicobar waters

A more pertinent question is how ecologically meaningful most coral restoration efforts are. A recent review of restoration projects across the tropics show that most of them are positively tiny (a median size of 71 m², or about one-twentieth the size of an Olympic swimming pool) compared with the size of most reefs. Restoration efforts at more ecologically meaningful spatial and temporal scales are rare: less than 4 per cent of recorded projects have attempted anything more than a hectare, according to a recent review by Hughes and others (2023).²² There is a good reason projects are not larger: the costs and effort involved in genuinely scaling up restoration to ecologically meaningful sizes can be prohibitive. These costs can range from $50,000 to a whopping $1 million a hectare of reef restored (Rs.41 lakh to Rs.8.3 crore a hectare).

There are even more critical questions worth posing. Evaluating the effectiveness of a restoration project by focussing on the survivorship of coral is to conflate an indicator with a target. Yes, the fact that transplanted coral survive is an inherently good thing. But that is rather a far cry from restoring a healthy reef. Corals are among the most important architectural elements of a reef, but a reef is more than coral. The reef is a vibrant assemblage of dynamic and diverse relationships, full of complex flows of material and energy, held together with myriad interactions and behaviours that together form a suite of essential functions that determine how healthy the ecosystem is. And while it may be possible on living reefs to capture much of this complexity in simple measures of coral cover and survival, for restoration projects to use this as their primary measure of success is to misunderstand what the index was meant to stand in for in the first place. To say it more bluntly: A barge-full of transplanted coral does not constitute a reef, just as a vacant lot packed with prefabricated houses is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a bustling metropolis.

Bleached coral in the Gulf of Mannar in the Indian Ocean in 2016.
| Photo Credit:
By special arrangement

Perhaps the most important question in evaluating the effectiveness of coral restoration is what problem it is meant to solve. To hear its enthusiastic proponents, restoration is the conservation action of the future—necessary to reverse the spate of bad news we constantly hear from tropical reefs. As climate change and habitat destruction destroy vast swathes of reef area, our best hope for reefs is to invest in large-scale restoration of degraded patches. And if we can use these same techniques to facilitate large-scale developmental projects by shifting an inconvenient ecosystem to a place where it will not be a bother, why not?

Yet, if past results are anything to go by, it is clear that these claims are either wildly optimistic or cynically disingenuous. Getting coral to grow or translocating it, no matter how forcibly we do it, does not constitute the restoration of the reef as a living ecosystem. It does not guarantee that the integrity and health of the reef are preserved in all its dynamic bounty. Nor is it a solution to the problems of climate change. It cannot, even at its most effective, address the ecosystem-scale challenges that modern reefs face. As a recent commentary in Nature Climate Change insisted,²³ coral restoration is at best a feel-good palliative action that has little to do with saving coral reefs. If we are serious about conserving reefs, the authors claim, we do not need heroic interventions but more studied, transformative, and systemic solutions based on what is known about how these complex social-ecological systems work. We need urgent action on climate change. And we need to ask hard questions about what we, as a society, would like to privilege when managing coral reefs and the human communities dependent on them.

What would those transformative solutions look like at the local level? For one, they would start with addressing the problems at their source rather than seeking Band-Aid remedies at the point of impact. More often than not, ecosystems have a remarkable ability to recover their inherent functions once pressures reduce, and the best hope of restoration is to support this inherent capacity. For another, it is critical to recognise the primacy of place. It is a corruption of the restoration project to believe that ecosystems are formed of Lysenkoist species, endlessly protean, able to be engineered into any chimeric form the state decides, transplanted to flourish in more convenient locations, outside the steamrollers of progress.

An ecosystem is more than a ragbag of species, thrown together by chance and circumstance. Species interact, with each other and with the environment around them. In the dialectical relationship between species and habitats, ecosystems are created, maintained, and transformed. If restoration is to rescue itself from being merely a convenient instrument of a developmentalist state, it needs to focus not so much on the survival of individuals as on the restoration of broken relationships between species and habitats, and on the supporting of critical functions and processes that hold ecosystems together. This is clearly a harder task than compensatory afforestation or translocating colonies with chainsaws and epoxy and will need more careful understanding of how these ecosystems work, their resilience against all the forces of change, and their ultimate vulnerabilities.

So what then should we make of the Galathea Bay recommendations? While the project plans appear to be primarily economy and tourism oriented, reports have suggested a strategic relevance as well of Great Nicobar for the Indian government. A project oriented towards defence or strategic purposes would, however, likely require much less area and cause less damage than the transshipment port, airport, greenfield township, and tourism. Regardless of the scale of the operation, we have to acknowledge that the attempt at compensatory afforestation will certainly not suffice to replace the lost rainforests of Great Nicobar even if tree planting is carried out over 10 times the area in the completely different ecosystems of the Aravallis or central India. Restorative efforts often focus on measures such as area covered, number of saplings planted, or at best plant survival in the near-term (two to three years).

None of these indicators is a sufficient measure of the recovery of an ecosystem dominated by long-lived organisms like trees that may live for 300–500 years or more. While there is a limited role for ecological restoration in rainforests that were formerly reduced to a highly degraded state, nothing in contemporary research suggests that destroying intact old-growth tropical rainforests such as those on Great Nicobar can ever be sufficiently recovered or compensated for by such measures as are known today.

Divers assemble a piece of biodegradable material with coral colonies in the tropical coral reef of Burgers’ Ocean aquarium in Arnhem, Netherlands, in May 2022. Studies suggest that coral restoration is at best a feel-good palliative action. 
| Photo Credit:
KOEN VAN WEEL/AFP

Similarly, can reef-salvaging operations of the kind being proposed for the region ever be justified? Even if we were to ignore the logistic challenges and expenses involved, we would still be left with the vexing question of what exactly we would achieve by translocating 16,000 coral individuals from one bay to another. A recent study of bleaching susceptibility during the 2016 El Niño event²⁴ showed that the Nicobar region was particularly susceptible to high sea surface temperatures. As we write this, the retreating El Niño of 2023–24 has left dramatic scars on reefs across the world, and although no independent researchers can survey the Nicobar reefs, sea surface temperatures have been soaring, with bleaching warnings unusually persistent in Great Nicobar waters.

Also Read | Editor’s Note: The Great Nicobar sellout

This raises difficult questions about how meaningful any amount of restoration would be in the face of increasing heat stress in a bleaching hot spot. It is difficult to know how many of the 8,900 Acropora individuals (apart from the rest) have survived the current El Niño, and whether they will survive the next heatwave when it hits in the next few years. Even if they do, what do we gain with their translocation? At best, we would have committed a grand violence on a living ecosystem to create a caricature version of one, which we would then dress up as an ecological rescue operation, held together with epoxy.

What are the options?

What then are the options before us? One that deserves serious consideration is to send the project back to the drawing board to avoid the large-scale transformation that a city, port, and tourism will cause. A reconsideration of the project focussed on strengthening strategic needs while safeguarding existing forests and Shompen territories and addressing the needs of the great Nicobarese, including their return to their ancestral lands, would be very worthwhile. The more limited impact on Great Nicobar ecosystems could then be addressed with a critical conversation about ecological restoration in all its flavours. We can make careful accounting of when it works and under what sets of circumstances. This conversation needs to focus on the techniques we use, how ecologically and socially meaningful the outcomes are, the metrics we use to evaluate these outcomes, and the costs of these interventions. We can undertake a critical, deep, cross-sectoral reckoning about why we need to use these approaches in the first place, and what it is we are giving up when we resort to them. Above all, like every potentially beautiful solution, we need to be mindful of when it is a legitimate response to the problem at hand and when it is merely a lazy and cynical sleight of hand dressed up as a panacea.

But how can we view the restoration plans if the development is a fait accompli, as it appears to be at present? Then, it becomes our duty as a scientific community not to validate a planned ecological catastrophe with palliative fixes. It makes us complicit in a double ecological duplicity. The first is subterfuge that the impacts of the development are unlikely to be large in the first place. The second, and perhaps more pernicious, is that it perpetuates the notion that there is no engineering violence we can impose on the world that cannot be solved with just a little more engineering. The truth is that ecological systems and the functions they embody cannot be engineered in and out of existence without considering their uniqueness of geography, their peculiarities of environment, and the contingencies of history.

A more honest response then? Declare the ecosystem dead. Declare it dead in large cautionary letters. Document its passing in numbers and in words. Enumerate not merely the trees and corals that were lost but the countless other species, present and future for whom the ecosystem will no longer be home. In its obituary, list down all the functions and services the ecosystem provided. Speak as eloquently as we can of the rich unwritten history that has been erased. Sit quietly with the loss, along with the peoples for whom this loss means more than it would ever mean for us. Mourn this loss with civility. Bear witness to the fact that these ecosystems, unknowable in their complexity, made way for a certain idea of material progress, a vision of modernity, and a signal to the world about who we are as a nation, and what we are capable of.

The reckoning will come later. As with Lysenkoism, it may come much, much later. And when it does, our bearing of witness will have served its purpose. Does this serve as restorative justice? Perhaps not. But, as a community that cares deeply about the ecosystems that sustain us, this is the truest thing we can do.

Rohan Arthur is a marine biologist. T.R. Shankar Raman is a wildlife scientist. The views expressed are personal.

Footnotes

1 see for instance, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/trofim-lysenko-soviet-union-russia/54878

Lewontin, R., Levins, R. (1976). The Problem of Lysenkoism. In: Rose, H., Rose, S. (eds) The Radicalisation of Science. Critical Social Studies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86145-3_2

2 Seksaria, P. 2024. The Great Nicobar Betrayal. THG Publishing Private Limited, Chennai. [Articles compiled in this publication present critiques on various aspects.]

Moorthy, N. 2024. Great Nicobar Port Project: The Red Flags in EIA Report That Have Gone Ignored. The Quint, 19 Sep 2024, https://www.thequint.com/opinion/central-government-great-nicobar-island-port-project-flaws-red-flags-i a-report-ignored

3 Dhillon, A. 2024. India’s plan for untouched Nicobar isles will be ‘death sentence’ for isolated tribe. The Guardian, 7 Feb 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/feb/07/india-port-airport-power-plant-military-proje ct-great-nicobar-island-death-sentence-shompen-indigenous-people-warning Pardikar, R. (2024) Nicobarese Anthropologist & Former Officer Questions Modi Govt Claims O Controversial Great Nicobar Project. Article-14, 30 Septemer 2024, https://article-14.com/post/nicobarese-anthropologist-former-officer-questions-modi-govt-claims-over-co oversial-great-nicobar-project-66f9d6522240e

4 Ganapathi, S. 2024. A ‘Major Port’ in Great Nicobar Island: A Byproduct of ‘Make in India’ Syndrome? The Quint, 7 Sep 2024, https://www.thequint.com/opinion/great-nicobar-island-major-port-environmental-damage-unviable-transshi pment-project Civil Society (2024a) Goodbye to the Great Nicobar? Civil Society, 28 September 2024, https://www.civilsocietyonline.com/cover-story/goodbye-to-the-great-nicobar/

5 Civil Society (2024b) ‘Possible to bolster security without harming ecology’. Civil Society, 28 Sep 2024, https://www.civilsocietyonline.com/cover-add-ons/possible-to-bolster-security-without-harming-ecology/

6 Umapathy, G., Singh, M., and Mohnot, S. M. 2003. Status and Distribution of Macaca fascicularis umbrosa in the Nicobar Islands, India. International Journal of Primatology 24: 281-293. The paper reported a density of 997 trees per hectare of stems greater than 15 cm girth at breast height (GBH). Even conservatively considering a density of 600 trees per hectare with stems >30 cm GBH and a forest destruction area of 6599 ha suggests nearly 40 lakh trees will be destroyed.

7 See Vaishnavi Rathore. 2024. 1 crore trees – not 8.5 lakh – could be cut for Great Nicobar project, one ecologist estimates. https://scroll.in/article/1074221/1-crore-trees-not-8-5-lakh-could-be-cut-for-great-nicobar-project-one-ecologist-estimates

8 The details are not available in the EIA, although some figures appear to be presented in a blurry and unreadable form in an Annexure X.

9 Rathore, V. 2023. Can a safari park outside Delhi make up for a lost Nicobar forest? Scroll.in 19 April 2023, https://scroll.in/article/1047526/can-a-safari-park-outside-delhi-make-up-for-a-lost-nicobar-forest

10 CAG. 2013. Report of the Controller and Auditor General of India on Compensatory Afforestation in India, compliance audit, No. 21 of 2013, New Delhi.

11 Arasumani, M., Khan, D., Vishnudas, C.K., Muthukumar, M., Bunyan, M., and Robin, V.V. 2019. Invasion compounds an ecosystem-wide loss to afforestation in the tropical grasslands of the Shola Sky Islands. Biological Conservation 230: 141–150. Asher, M., and Bhandari, P. 2021. Mitigation or Myth? Impacts of Hydropower Development and Compensatory Afforestation on forest ecosystems in the high Himalayas. Land Use Policy 100: 105041. Coleman, E.A., Schultz, B., Ramprasad, V., Fischer, H., Rana, P., Filippi, A.M., . . . and Fleischman, F. 2021. Limited effects of tree planting on forest canopy cover and rural livelihoods in Northern India. Nature Sustainability 4: 997–1004. Rana, P., Fleischman, F., Ramprasad, V., and Lee, K. 2022. Predicting wasteful spending in tree planting programs in Indian Himalaya. World Development 154: 105864. Tambe, S., G.S. Rawat, P. Krishen, M.K. Ranjitsinh, N. Ghosh, A.S. Rawat and J. Takpa. 2022. Compensatory afforestation policy in India: an analysis using an ecorestoration lens. International Forestry Review 24(4): 607-618.

12 Di Sacco, A., Hardwick, K.A., Blakesley, D., Brancalion, P.H.S., Breman, E., Cecilio Rebola, L., Chomba, S., Dixon, K., Elliott, S., Ruyonga, G., Shaw, K., Smith, P., Smith, R.J. and Antonelli, A. (2021), Ten golden rules for reforestation to optimize carbon sequestration, biodiversity recovery and livelihood benefits. Global Change Biology 27: 1328-1348. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15498

13 Rajpurohit, A. (2023) SC-appointed panel warns against Andaman’s proposal to ‘revive’ palm oil plantations. Newslaundry, 23 January 2023, https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/01/23/sc-appointed-panel-warns-against-andamans-proposal-to-revive palm-oil-plantations

14 Sandilyan, S., Meenakumari, B., Biju Kumar, A. and Karthikeyan Vasudevan. 2018. Impacts of invasive alien species on island ecosystems of India with special reference to Andaman group of islands – National Biodiversity Authority, Chennai

15 Krishnan, A. and Osuri, A.M. (2023), Beyond the passive–active dichotomy: aligning research with the intervention continuum framework of ecological restoration. Restoration Ecology 31: e13828. https://doi.org/10.1111/rec.13828 Tambe et al. (2022), op. cit.

16 Crouzeilles, R. et al. (2017) Ecological restoration success is higher for natural regeneration than for active restoration in tropical forests. Science Advances 3: e1701345. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1701345 Chazdon, R.L. and Uriarte, M. (2016), Natural regeneration in the context of large-scale forest and landscape restoration in the tropics. Biotropica 48: 709-715. https://doi.org/10.1111/btp.12409

17 Osuri, A. M., S. Kasinathan, M. K. Siddhartha, D. Mudappa, and T. R. S. Raman. 2019. Effects of restoration on tree communities and carbon storage in rainforest fragments of the Western Ghats, India. Ecosphere 10(9): e02860. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.2860

18 Osuri et al. (2019), op. cit.

19 Di Sacco et al. (2021), op. cit.

20 Boström-Einarsson, Lisa, Russell C. Babcock, Elisa Bayraktarov, Daniela Ceccarelli, Nathan Cook, Sebastian CA Ferse, Boze Hancock et al. (2020) Coral restoration–A systematic review of current methods, successes, failures and future directions. PloS One 15: e0226631. ]

21 Reported in Vimta and ANIIDCO. 2022. Anticipated Environmental Impacts and Mitigation Measures. in Comprehensive Environmental Impact Assessment Report. Chapter 4A: C4-C11.

22 Hughes, Terry P., Andrew H. Baird, Tiffany H. Morrison, and Gergely Torda (2023). Principles for coral reef restoration in the anthropocene. One Earth 6: 656-665.

23 Streit, Robert P., Tiffany H. Morrison, and David R. Bellwood (2024). Coral reefs deserve evidence-based management not heroic interference. Nature Climate Change 14: 773–775.

24 McClanahan, T. R., Darling, E. S., Maina, J. M., Muthiga, N. A., D’agata, Stephanie, Jupiter, S. D., Arthur, R., Wilson, S. K., Mangubhai, S., Nand, Y., Ussi, A. M., Humphries, A. T., Patankar, V. J., Guillaume, M. M. M., Keith, S. A., Shedrawi, G., Julius, P., Grimsditch, G., Ndagala, J., & Leblond, J. (2019). Temperature patterns and mechanisms influencing coral bleaching during the 2016 El Niño. Nature Climate Change 9: 845– https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0576-8

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