Global efforts to conserve big cats must scale up
The third Asia Ministerial Conference on Tiger Conservation, which begins in Delhi today, comes at a crucial time in the global effort to save the big cat. India is rightly playing a leading role. The meeting is the latest step in the larger Global Tiger Initiative that began in 2010, when more than a dozen Tiger Range Countries (states with natural tiger habitats) joined hands with the World Bank and some wildlife conservation groups to bring back the tiger from the jaws of extinction. The inaugural summit was held in St Petersburg, Russia, and was the first of its kind. Attended by several state leaders, it marked the beginning of a serious global effort to tackle this transnational problem.
Up until then, most conservation efforts had been done at the national level and in isolation. As a result, no one even knew for sure how many tigers existed in the world, forget about countries such as India cooperating with its neighbours to keep transboundary tiger corridors open or fight against poachers who run large-scale international rackets. The Russia summit, incidentally held in the Chinese Year of the Tiger, changed all this and put in place a new model of cooperation. It also set a long-term goal: Double the tiger population in the wild by 2022, the next Chinese Year of the Tiger.
To achieve this goal, known as Tx2, a 12-year-long recovery programme was also laid out. This year's conference, coming in at the half-way mark of the 12-year plan, is an important point for stock-taking and ensuring that participating countries stay the course. Initial reports suggest that there have been some successes — for one, the number of wild tigers is on an upward trajectory for the time in over 100 years. The Global Tiger Forum estimates that there are now 3,890 tigers worldwide, compared to 3,200 in 2010. But this rate is still not good enough to achieve the Tx2 goal in time. In fact, Cambodia, where a tiger was seen for the last time in 2007, has announced that the big cat is now ‘functionally extinct’ in that TRC.
India, home to as many as 2,226 tigers, has registered some major successes, such a thriving re-introduction programme at Panna and Sariska reserves (which it hopes to share with other TRCs) and a five per cent increase in tiger habitat under protection. India has also created, trained, and equipped several Special Tiger Protection Forces. Importantly, India has also been working with the other TRCs in its neighbourhood on a variety of transboundary initiatives. With Bangladesh, it has an agreement on the conservation of the Royal Bengal Tiger and the Sundarbans specifically; with Nepal, India is working on law enforcement issues; with China, it is coordinating on tiger conservation in general. India also has a joint resolution for tiger conservation with Russia, worked with Bhutan to conduct the first tiger survey in Manas and is now sharing intelligence with its South-East Asian neighbours to prevent poaching in that region.