IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Rubayat, A.; Hussain, I.; Akter, R.; Barlow, C.G.; Hossain, T.; Chowdhury, M.N.R.; Islam, M.R.; Child, T. | |
| BTAP Communications, Education and Public Outreach Strategy - Local Campaign 2012-2016 | |
| 2012 Full Book | |
Tiger (_Panthera tigris_) numbers in the wild continue to decline throughout most of their range, despite decades of focused conservation efforts. The Bangladesh government and other stakeholders have developed a Bangladesh Tiger Action Plan 2010-2017 which broadly categorises the threats to tigers as habitat degradation, prey depletion, and direct killing, and these have been broken down further and also prioritized to focus conservation efforts. Stray tiger killing, prey poaching and consumption by local communities have been identified as high priority and to be tackled over the coming five years. Recognising that these threats are linked directly to human behaviours, the Sundarbans Tiger Project has developed a five year social change strategy utilizing social marketing theory to change the behaviour of local communities and therefore increase the chances of survival of the Sundarbans tiger (STP, in prep.). As per social marketing theory, the strategy consists of a blend of three types of strategic actions which together can achieve behaviour change: education, regulation/law enforcement and provision of alternatives. The goal of this 5 year strategy is to reduce the decline of wild tigers in the Bangladesh Sundarbans by reducing stray tiger killing by 70% and by reducing local deer meat consumption and poaching by 50% in the 26 unions buffering the Sundarbans. Note: The reduction percentages will be reviewed once more when accurate baseline data on the scale of these threats has been gathered. This is in order to better understand the rate at which the threats need to be reduced in order to ensure the Sundarbans tiger population remains viable. The Communications, Education and Public Outreach (CEPA) strand of the strategy aims to use five phases of campaign activities to engage, interact with and inspire local communities to change. The target audiences will be taken on a social change journey which will take them from a pre-contemplative stage right through to positive action. This phasing is based on existing social change theory. The completion of the whole campaign will lead to a reduction in deer poaching due to people's improved attitude towards saving deer, expressed in their new behaviours of not eating deer meat, not poaching deer, and informing the authorities of deer consumption and poaching by others. The target is to achieve a 50% reduction in deer poaching/consumption by the local communities in the campaign area after five years. Likewise, the local people's improved attitude towards stray tigers and their normalised behaviour of saving tigers that enter villages instead of killing them will reduce stray tiger killing across the Sundarbans. The target is to achieve a 70% reduction in stray tiger killing by the local communities in the campaign area after five years. The overall outcome will be that local communities will be actively engaged in reducing three key threats to tigers and their prey instead of being the cause of those threats. |
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