IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Walston, J.; Karanth, U.; Stokes, E. | |
| Avoiding the unthinkable: what will it cost to prevent tigers becoming extinct in the wild? | |
| 2010 Full Book | |
The world's wild Tiger population is at an historically unprecedented low of about 3,200 animals with possibly only 1,000 breeding females. Recent declines have affected every range state and although pockets of conservation success exist, they remain isolated exceptions to the overall range-wide trend of unremitting losses. Although over a million square kilometers of Tiger habitat still exists from India to the Russian Far East, hunting of Tigers and their prey continues to empty Asia's forests, a problem exacerbated by habitat destruction and fragmentation. Even where Tigers persist today they are often represented by remnant populations of a few isolated individuals. If the unthinkable is to be avoided and the Tiger is not to become extinct in the wild across much or all of its range, then conservation investments must sharply focus on identifying those sites that offer the greatest potential for Tiger recovery and prioritise them for immediate, sustained and intensive protection and monitoring support. While the current international response to the crisis is growing, many conservation approaches are unfocussed, unnecessarily complex, overly ambitious and often geographically diffuse. This report defines and identifies a priority sub-set of areas across the Tiger's current range, called Source Sites. These sites not only contain the majority of the world's remaining wild Tigers but they also have the greatest potential for halting the decline and initiating a sustained recovery of Tigers. The report provides evidence for Source Sites as the appropriate spatial scale at which priority interventions should be targeted. The protection of Source Sites is a pragmatic and achievable goal that will provide quicker and far greater return on conservation investments than some current approaches. Source sites, by definition, already have breeding Tigers, are of a spatial scale that is practical to protect, have existing conservation infrastructure, a legal mandate for protection and, ultimately, have the potential to repopulate larger landscapes. The report presents a challenging but straightforward conservation strategy based on proven examples of sustained Tiger recoveries in landscapes where a Source Site approach has been taken. It quantifies the potential population increase this strategy could achieve across the Tiger's range, and evaluates the costs of implementing this strategy. |
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