Environment and Disaster Management › Protected areas and habitats

Marine and coastal ecosystems

Coasts and seas as ecosystems: mangroves, seagrass, estuaries and lagoons, coastal regulation and erosion, marine protected areas and the treaties for the high seas. Prelims has asked what blue carbon is and where India has coral reefs.

Foundation note: Coral reefs of India

UPSC has asked

Prelims 2026: why mangroves matter for climate resilience
Prelims 2016: The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB)

Showing 3 of 8 articles, those that changed from 1 to 31 August 2026.Show all

Fisheries and the deep sea

National report on deep-sea fishery resources

Prelims and Mains

The national report on deep sea fishery resources is the Ministry of Earth Sciences' account of the fish in India's deep water, below the reach of light.

The mesopelagic zone, 200 to 1,000 metres down, holds lanternfishes, deep sea shrimps and squids, most of the ocean's fish by weight.
The banks and slopes that hold them are the ones a fleet could strip.
India's research vessel Sagar Sampada has surveyed its deep water for three decades.

What changed

20 Aug 2026BriefThe Ministry of Earth Sciences released a national report on deep sea fishery resources, drawing on the cruises of Sagar Sampada. It flags Kollam Bank, Angria Bank, the Mangalore slope, the Thiruvananthapuram terrace, Lakshadweep and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as vulnerable areas. PIB, 20 Aug 2026: National report on deep-sea fishery resources and marine hotspots (opens in a new tab)

Marine fish stock accounts

Prelims and Mains

Marine fish stock accounts apply natural capital accounting, which records natural assets and their depletion, to India's marine fish stocks.

Gross domestic product (GDP) misses depletion: a fishery counts in GDP as the fish landed, not as the stock left behind.
The United Nations System of Environmental Economic Accounting is the framework, and the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) is testing it, so that what a fleet takes can be set against what the taking costs.

Judge the stock
Compare current landings with ten years of landing data
Resource rent
Income left after labour, costs, depreciation and a normal return on vessels
Discount
Future rents brought to present value at a 2% real rate
Asset account
Shows whether the stock is maintained, depleted or regenerating

MoSPI's proposed method for marine fish stocks, from The Hindu, 31 August 2026

What changed

31 Aug 2026BriefMoSPI set out how it would build natural capital and climate risk accounts for the blue economy, starting with marine fish stocks; the method is in the figure. The Hindu, 31 Aug 2026: India's plan to begin natural-capital and climate-risk accounting of its blue economy | Explained (opens in a new tab)

Coasts under pressure

Great Nicobar project

Prelims and Mains

The Great Nicobar project is a plan for an International Container Transshipment Port at Galathea Bay, a greenfield joint use airport, a township and a power plant on Great Nicobar Island.

It covers 166.1 sq km of the 921 sq km island.

Two figures for the tribal reserve

Government statement	Tribal reserve land in the project
2023	7.11 sq km
1 May 2026	84.1 sq km

The government's own figure for tribal reserve land in the project rose more than tenfold between 2023 and May 2026.Source: Frontline, 8 June 2026

Why the island matters

The island is a biodiversity hotspot and home to the Shompen, a particularly vulnerable tribal group.
The giant leatherback turtle nests at Galathea Bay, whose wildlife sanctuary was denotified in 2021 to make way for the port.
The island is seismically active and subsided in the 2004 earthquake.
Island coasts are zoned under the Island Coastal Regulation Zone framework, in which category IA is the most restrictive.

What changed

7 Aug 2026newly added
- The Zoological Survey of India records a reef of 116 hectares with more than 100 species of reef building coral in Galathea Bay, while the 2023 coastal maps of the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management show no coral there.
- A site with coral reef falls in the most protected coastal category, where a port cannot be built.
- The submission that the bay is a lower category was central to the National Green Tribunal dismissing objections in February 2026.
Mains: a mapping decision, and not an environmental argument, settled what the project may legally do.
Frontline, 7 Aug 2026: The coastal zone maps that cleared the Great Nicobar port show Galathea Bay as free of corals, while the Zoological Survey of India is planning to translocate the corals that are there. (opens in a new tab)
12 Jun 2026
- The Zoological Survey of India chose four west coast sites to move coral and giant clam colonies from the port area, both Schedule I species.
- A Wildlife Institute of India survey found leatherback nests at Galathea Bay.
- The government now says 84.1 sq km of the project falls in tribal reserves, against its 2023 figure of 7.11 sq km.
The Indian Express, 12 Jun 2026: 4 sites on Nicobar west coast identified for coral translocation, says Zoological Survey of India (opens in a new tab) · Frontline, 8 Jun 2026: Great Nicobar's blueprint for 'development at any cost' (opens in a new tab)

Also filed elsewhere

India's deep sea mining programme · on Ocean, polar and earth science missions
India's deep sea mining programme explores the seabed for minerals under three International Seabed Authority contracts.