Assessment of future coastal risk zones along the Andaman coast to strengthen sustainable development

Future Composite Coastal Risk Index (CCRI) has been calculated to strengthen the development programs in the context of biodiversity conservation and sustainable management of natural resources along the Andaman coast. Total thirty-one parameters are used in the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model to prepare the risk zone which is segmented into four groups for individual group-wise risk assessment. Land use and Land cover (LULC) have been prepared using supervised classification techniques with 6000 signatures. Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) based climatic data and population projection information play a major role, which has not been used previously for risk investigation in this study area. The risk zones of 2018 and the LULC classes have been validated by 978 field sample point and finally tehsil wise risk factors have been extracted using sensitivity analysis. The overall operation reflects a significant increase (4.35%) in the very high-risk zones in the absence of mangrove and coral ecosystem in 2030 compared to 2018. A large number of fishermen are trying to shift their primary occupation due to the unavailability of sufficient fishes in the near-shore regions, which is an indication of drastic changes in coastal ecosystems over the region in the last 3 decades. Therefore, the prediction of future coastal landscape in the absence of mangrove–coral ecosystem will draw a major concern in development planning which will strengthen the United Nation Development Program (UNDP) climate change mitigation, ecological restoration and biodiversity conservation planning, sustainable livelihood management practices, future research work in risk mitigation and management field.