The United Kingdom agreed last week to return the Chagos Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean, to the African nation of Mauritius after buying the islands and forcibly removing its native inhabitants in the late 1960s to make way for a U.

The environmental impacts of a change in management and human activity depends on what, if any, development takes place and how it is managed.

After years of legal wrangling and negotiations, Britain said it would surrender sovereignty of the archipelago in the Indian Ocean.