Highlights from 'Setting Priorities for the Conservation and Recovery of the World's Tigers: 2005-2015'
About the Study
- This is the most comprehensive report on the state of wild tigers ever produced and serves as a roadmap to guide conservation investors, practitioners, development agencies and governments as to actions needed to save wild tigers.
- Tiger conservation landscapes (TCLs) -- an area with sufficient habitat for at least five tigers and where tigers have been confirmed to occur in the last 10 years -- were assessed and 76 identified across Asia.
- TCL's were then prioritized by analyzing three data sets:
- land cover derived from satellite images;
- human interference data based on a previous global human footprint analysis; and
- tiger distribution records from on-the-ground tiger sightings and signs, gathered from more than 3,000 tiger location points and input from 160 of the world's leading tiger conservation experts.
Important Findings
- Tigers occupy just seven percent of their historic range.
- Tigers use 40 percent less area than was estimated in the first habitat assessment, completed in 1995 and published in 1997.
- A large area of habitat remains (>1.1 million km2).
- Four strongholds were found that can support more than 500 tigers:
- Russian Far East-Northeast China,
- Terai Arc Landscape of India and Nepal,
- Northern Forest Complex-Namdapha-Royal Manas (Bhutan/Myanmar/India) and
- Tenasserims of Thailand and Myanmar.
- Just 23 percent of tiger conservation landscapes are protected.
Recommendations to ensure a future for tigers:
- Create human-tiger friendly landscapes that offer both core protected areas, surrounded by buffer zones where tigers can raise their young and allow humans and tigers to co-exist, and provide corridors that will connect tigers to other core protected areas.
- Increase conservation investment. Between 1998 and 2003, US$23.3 million was invested in all tiger conservation landscapes, with the two most significant donors being WWF and Save the Tiger Fund.
- Improve conservation across international borders - 18 of the tiger conservation landscapes are transboundary.
- Essential goals for the next 10 years:
- Secure tiger populations in all global-priority tiger landscapes;
- Obtain reserve status for 10 places with unprotected breeding tiger populations;
- Establish at least five tiger habitat "corridors" between fragmented tiger conservation landscapes.
- Expand the range of breeding tigers in at least five priority tiger conservation landscapes.
- Implement a holistic conservation strategy. This should engage regional development organizations, government officials, NGO's and businesses to consider tiger conservation needs in national and regional development plans.
|
){kind=link}
){kind=link}