Tigers Transcript

Operator: Mr. Lalley, please go ahead.

Tom Lalley: Good afternoon or for some of you, good morning and welcome to another in a series of conference calls to bring you closer to WWF's work and let you share how your contributions are being used. My name is Tom Lalley. I'm a Communications Officer here at WWF and I'll be moderating the call today.

You were invited to be on this call because of your continuing support of WWF's work. Your support makes our work possible and all of us here at World Wildlife Fund thank you for your support. We're talking today about a ground-breaking new report on wild tigers written by WWF and other scientists.

The report found that wild tigers have vanished from more than 40 percent of the places they were estimated to live just a decade ago. But the report also found good news: conservation efforts have resulted in some populations remaining stable or even increasing.

We have two guests today: Eric Dinerstein, Chief Scientist and Vice President for Science at World Wildlife Fund and Author of the new book Tiger Land and Other Destinations, and Colby Loucks, a Senior Conservation Specialist in WWF's Conservation Science Department. We'll hear from them in a moment, but first a few points on logistics.

This call is scheduled to last an hour and we'll try to keep as close to on time as possible. Also, please note - know that a transcript of this call will be published on WWF's website, but participant names will not be used.

And now, I'll hand things over to Eric. After he speaks, we'll get right to your questions.

Eric Dinerstein: Thanks Tom, and good afternoon everyone. Thank you all for listening today and participating, and I think that I can speak for everybody in saying that we're delighted with the reaction that we've had in the news media in response to the dramatic results that we recorded yesterday.

As I said in the opening statements that we made, if Wall Street traded in a commodity called tiger of futures then yesterday would have been Black Thursday because of the two pieces of news that we had to announce based on our comprehensive two-year study of tiger presence and tiger habitats: that overall, tigers are now restricted to only seven percent of their historic range, and, most importantly, in the last decade, the tiger occupancy is down 40 percent from what we estimated 10 years ago when we did our first range wide assessment of tigers.

So this is really a call to arms for all of us and I think that one of the points that we really tried hard to bring home was the policy implications of what the science is telling us, which is that we really need to think about developing and promoting a tiger summit, a gathering of government leaders from tiger countries to get together and make a commitment to save tigers forever.

We need something that we can build on as a model, which we did very successfully for the Yaounde Summit that was really pivotal for changing the course of conservation in the Congo Basin, so nothing less is needed here in Asia.

Tom Lalley: OK. Well, Eric, actually if you could talk a bit more about the Tiger Summit and what are the next steps? I mean, obviously the news is not good, but the question is, what do we do from here?

Eric Dinerstein: OK. Let me take a step back and say that while the news is not good, in terms of aggregate if the overall study shows a decline, that can sometimes mask areas where tigers' conditions are actually improving or where there are more tigers today than there were 10 or 20 years ago.

That's certainly the case with this study in that we can point to a number of places that we talk about in the report, places where we think that-we know that-tigers are doing better, and places that can probably have as many as 500 breeding tigers over the long term. Some of these include places where WWF is quite active like the Terai Arc landscape in Southern Nepal and Northern India, the Russian Far East, the Tenasserim Range that is the range of mountains that goes down the peninsula in Southeast Asia and Thailand and Myanmar, and the large drive for a complex in Cambodia ' s dry forests.

So there are clearly opportunities here for doing large scale conservations and bringing I think some of the other places that aren't doing as well to learn the lessons from what works in the places where we are succeeding, and try to extend that across the range.

So while this report does identify places where tigers are in decline and where we were quite honestly surprised by the low occupancy of tigers such as in the dry forests in Cambodia which we thought would be a stronghold - parts of Cambodia anyway - that there are places that we can point to where I think things can work very well.

As far as the Tiger Summit goes, maybe for those who are not so familiar with the work that WWF did years ago in the Congo Basin, we recognize that a lot of the efforts that we were doing there were somewhat disjointed, a little bit ad hoc, were not well funded, and not well enough coordinated among the different conservation groups and government agencies that were working there. So what we did was to put together a broad vision for conservation showing what success would look like in the Congo Basin, and this became the basis for the convocation of leaders for the Yaounde Summit. And what happened after this group got together was that the President of Gabon identified 13 new national parks to be created and other leaders followed suit.
It led to a dramatic increase in funding through the USA's Congo Basin Forest Partnerships that help finance conservation across large areas. And we identified 12 large landscapes for conservation that would be large enough and intact enough to conserve the wildlife of the Congo Basin in perpetuity.

So we felt that this was a great model to use, and very timely for our work for tiger conservation because we have the same set of issues. A lot of the important areas we identified for tiger conservation are transboundary-they span more than one country, typically because a lot of the remaining habitat is often located on the borders of countries-and we have to address the illegal trade issues because they are also transboundary and require meetings of all the range state leaders.

By bringing together the major donors of range state leaders, we can also better finance tiger conservation. So we think that we already have a model in place of how to make this work and can see this as the culmination of the two years of research that we've done to bring these results to the public.

Tom Lalley: Are there any questions out there?

WWF Supporter 3: Yes. I commend you for your work on this and so much more. My question has to do with the lessons that have been learned, and how is it that there are some strongholds amidst the expanding human populations and tremendous stress on those landscapes?

Eric Dinerstein: That's a good question, thanks. I think that some of this has to do with where the strongholds are located. In some cases, they are in very remote areas such as the Russian Far East, you know, the very low density of the tiger population and it's an area that really hasn't been heavily exploited for timber or for other resources. So it's a place that has remained more or less intact although that could be rapidly changing. And we can only look across the border at what would be called Manchurian China, which is potentially the same habitat as in the Russian Far East, but is almost completely gone because of the dramatic exploitation on that side of the border.

But if you go to other areas, like to the Terai Arc landscape, the reason why we think that tigers have persisted for a long time, there or in other parts of the Indian subcontinents, is that quite honestly there has been a long history of tiger and wildlife conservation. Dating back from the early days of the royal hunt for the maharajas, those areas became hunting reserves and then national parks, so you've had this long tradition of conservation and protection. And tigers are basically big cats and breed faster than their prey, and they come back very quickly when afforded the protection.

If you contrast that say with the tiger habitats and the range states that are Indochina and Southeast Asia, they never had that long history of conservation that's part of more recent culture, so it's been a much harder effort. And of course, a number of them have been subjects of major outbreaks of unrest or warfare and so consequently you had a decline through poaching of tiger prey, which ultimately leads to a decline of tigers.

So it's those issues I think, the remoteness and the longer history of conservation in the subcontinents, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh than compared, to say the habitats in Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, which didn't have that history.

Colby Loucks: To add to the points Eric made is that there's also disproportionate large number of the tiger landscapes now found in montane areas and what's been happening is that most of the the lowland areas that are more applicable for other economic activities such as agriculture or where that people want to live have undergone tremendous habitat loss.

This has pushed wildlife, not only tigers but all kinds of wildlife, into the more remote areas, as Eric mentioned, and most of these are in the mountainous areas such as the Western Thailand, the Russian Far East that he mentioned, and mountain ranges in Laos and Sumatra.

Continued in part two and in part three.