By virtue of being close to the epicentre, the Nicobar Islands located in the Bay of Bengal was severely affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Overwhelming aid followed, transforming an indigenous community of hunters-and-gatherers and coconut growers into a consumer society in a matter of months. Based on several years of fieldwork, this chapter describes the tsunami and its aftermath, the role of aid organisations, the media and the government in driving the islanders from a self-reliant to an aid dependent society, plagued with social conflicts. We call this a ‘complex disaster’, a situation that has fundamentally challenged the socio-ecological system to reproduce itself, an effect more severe and longer lasting than what the disaster itself had accomplished. In other words, a complex disaster is a consequence of inappropriate interventions following a “simple” disaster, which affects the social system’s ability to regenerate, to govern its own recovery, by interfering with its cultural, economic and political regulation. This in turn effects the environmental relations of the society, and its social metabolism.

This contribution investigates the role ofworking time in the course of agricultural development. In so doing, we revisit Ester Boserup’s (1965, 1981) hypothesis of increasing land productivity at the expense of declining labour productivity as a consequence of agricultural intensification in subsistence communities. We introduce a theoretical framework that centres on human time as a ‘limited’ biophysical resource and compare the labour burden across gender and age of four subsistence communities, one each from India, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Laos. While Boserup’s claim applies to early stages of agricultural development, we find the dynamics to change with the introduction of fossil fuel based inputs into agriculture, leading to a rise in labour productivity. Despite these improvements, we still find overall labour needs to increase with agricultural intensification. Since household labour remains largely constant during the development process, the labour burden is primarily borne by women.

In this chapter, we present preliminary results of a model of an SES of Kamorta Island (henceforth referred to as the K-SES model) belonging to the Nicobar archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. It is one of the very few attempts to link input–output metabolic modelling with an agent-based land-use change model rooted in the complex adaptive system approach. The modelled system includes the island of Kamorta with its human population and the surrounding reefs and shallow waters.

In the context of sustainable development, we investigatefour subsistence communities, one each from India, Bolivia,Laos and Thailand,to understand the systemic interrelationsbetween the food production systems and related environ-mental pressures. In doing so, we revisit Ester Boserup’s the-ory of increasing land productivity at the expense of declin-ing labour productivity as a consequence of agricultural in-tensification. Our data confirm Boserup’s assumptions with-in the reach of traditional agriculture, but find them not toapply to hunting & gathering communities and to agricultur-al systems now increasingly dependent on fossil fuels and in-dustrial fertilizers. Instead we propose a theory of “so-ciometabolic transitions” as being more appropriate to un-derstanding transitions in land and labour productivityacross a wider range of modes of subsistence.

From a “world system” perspective, this monograph describes the processes by which the Nicobar Islands became integrated into the global economy. Situated some 1,200 km off the east coast of India in the Bay of Bengal, the islands are home to an indigenous population of approximately 40,000 inhabitants who draw their sustenance from horticulture, pig rearing, fishing and, more recently, copra production. The location of the Nicobar Islands on an ancient trade route to southeast Asia has had inevitable consequences for both the inhabitants and the islands’ ecology; the pace of change increasing with the European colonisation of Asia. The islands are no longer a source of food and shelter to passing vessels as they used to be in former times, but are positioned, despite present protectionist measures, on the disadvantaged side of an exploitative relationship through an unequal exchange of resources within the modern world system. In drawing linkages between the world system perspective and environmental change, this monograph emphasises a shift from monetary indicators to biophysical indicators. Based on archival material and prolonged fieldwork, the monograph is a first detailed account of the colonial and economic history of the Nicobar Islands, and hence of interest not only to the scientific community, but to the general reader as well.

This dataset provides an overview of building material use in the year 2000 and 2001 in Trinket Island. It includes total annual weights, per capita material consumption, and the proportional contribution of each material, including cement, steel, wood, sand, gravel, and grass, as well as the overall total of all the materials.

This dataset showcases the material and energy flow data for Trinket Island for the year 2000, including the direct material input (DMI), the domestic material consumption (DMC), the direct energy input (DEI) and domestic energy consumption (DEC). The data details quantities of materials and energy consumed, imported, or extracted locally, including biomass, minerals, fossil fuels, other products, and overall total.

This dataset outlines the material flows in Trinket Island for the year 2000, including direct material inputs, exports by material type, and domestic material consumption. It tracks the quantities of different materials including biomass, minerals, fossil fuels, other products, and the overall total. It provides an overview of the material flows within the island.

From a material and energetic perspective, this paper outlines the patterns of society-nature interactions of a local horticultural, hunter-and-gatherer population that lives on a remote island between India and Indonesia. Based on empirical research, we present several indicators to show an economic portfolio of a local society that combines horticulture, hunting and gathering activities with elements of industrialisation and market economy. In describing these environmental relations, the study narrows its focus to the use of three socio-ecological concepts, namely socio-economic metabolism, colonising natural processes, and the energetic return on investment. Using these concepts, we show the dynamics of social and environmental transformation at a local level and the consequences this may have for sustainability.