Transformative tigers: Nature’s charismatic climate heroes

The forests, mangroves, and grasslands that tigers inhabit provide a variety of essential ecosystem services that can help us adapt to climate change impacts. These services include water filtration and protection against disasters like flooding and landslides. These ecosystems also help mitigate the climate crisis by storing carbon.³ Tigers enhance these ecosystem functions by protecting biodiversity. 

As apex (top) predators, tigers help maintain a balanced food chain with healthy plant and animal diversity.⁴ Preying upon ungulates, or hooved herbivores, tigers keep grazer populations in check.⁵ Healthy populations of herbivores do not overgraze, so the vegetation stays diverse and abundant. In turn, this vegetation provides shelter for smaller birds, insects, and mammals, which other predators and omnivores like dholes (wild dogs) and orangutans prey upon... and the cycle goes on.

Biodiversity is an essential component of a healthy and climate resilient ecosystem.⁶ A landscape lacking tigers suffers from an overabundance of ungulates, which leads to environmental degradation and inefficient ecosystem function. On the other hand, a healthy tiger landscape performs a host of essential climate mitigating functions from which we benefit. Therefore, the presence of tigers indicates a healthy ecosystem.⁷

In fact, in Asia, protected forests in tiger landscapes sequester carbon more efficiently than any other land management initiative, sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and permanently storing it. Moreover, tiger habitats overlap with nine globally important watersheds, which provide an estimated 830 million people with water.⁸

Tigers are key players when it comes to influencing conservation policies due to their charismatic nature. As such, they are the targets of many species-specific conservation initiatives.⁹ By happy consequence, these initiatives lead to the protection of tiger habitats as well as those of other iconic species, which are important for the ecosystem services that mitigate climate change.

Current tiger ranges overlap with four remarkably biodiverse global ecoregions, areas teeming with various plant and animal species: the Eastern Himalayas, Indo-Burma, Western Ghats, and Sundaland. These ranges also harbor other iconic species besides the tiger, like the Asian elephant, the Sumatran orangutan, and the Indian and Sumatran rhinoceroses. Along with these big-name celebrities, other important species like the porcupine and the swamp deer also occupy tiger ranges and benefit from their conservation.¹⁰

Protecting these species is important because they contribute to a healthy tiger landscape that can capture more atmospheric carbon. In India, one study determined that one million metric tons of carbon dioxide were prevented from being emitted into the atmosphere between 2007 and 2020 due to forest preservation resulting from tiger conservation initiatives.¹¹ That is equivalent to the yearly greenhouse gas emissions released from the cooking gas of 4.1 million Indian homes! In revenue, the same researchers found that the forests protected by tiger conservation initiatives yielded $6.24 million in carbon offsets and $92 million in ecosystem services.¹²

In the face of a daunting climate crisis, tigers offer us a glimmer of hope. As mighty climate heroes, they spur a host of climate benefits that go uncelebrated. From mitigating overgrazing and protecting biodiversity to influencing policy, tigers are stewards of their environment that help maintain balance and harmony in their ecosystem. In turn, these ecosystems mitigate climate change and provide essential functions to neighboring human communities, like clean water and abundant farmland.

However, despite their popularity and importance, tigers are endangered due to human-driven causes like hunting, poaching, habitat loss and fragmentation, and human-tiger conflict. In fact, only about 5,574 tigers remain in the wild today, and both Javan and Bali tigers (members of the subspecies Sunda tigers) have gone extinct in the past 80 years.¹³