When two big conservation groups roared that ““, the feel-good news was enthusiastically .
But all is not settled, despite the pronouncement from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Global Tiger Forum that “around 3890 tigers exist in the wild, up from an estimated 3200 in 2012”, with a doubling to “6000+” hoped for by 2022, the next Chinese year of the tiger.
The reality is that tigers have never been more endangered and may be in their deepest global decline in over a century.
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There have been small increases in Bhutan, Nepal and Russia, along with a from 1706 individuals in 2010, to 2226 in 2014. There were probably more tigers in India in 1994 (3750) than there are in the world today.
The backdrop is the loss of a staggering 42 per cent of the tiger’s known range or territory since 2006, . In its Red List of threatened species in 2015, it stated that global populations were “decreasing”.
In April this year, a group of leading conservation scientists added: “.”
And four biologists, including Arjun Gopalaswamy at the University of Oxford and Ullas Karanth, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s director for science in Asia, in a statement of concern, pointing to “serious methodological flaws, or weak and incomplete data” and calling them “a disservice to conservation”.
Last year, Gopalaswamy and Karanth exposed flaws in the method commonly used to calculate tiger numbers in India, in which an accurate small-scale survey is used to extrapolate to a bigger picture. Their 2015 paper in sparked uproar in India. It put tiger number rises in doubt and called for a new method. Scientists and officials affiliated to the government , to no avail.
Having been lucky enough to see these magnificent animals up close in Kahna National Park in central India, and as a former editor of WWF’s flagship publication WWF News and later as WWF International’s species conservation coordinator, I would desperately like some good news about tigers.
Yes, India has done more than any other country in the past 50 years to save its iconic species. It has an undisputed 60 to 70 per cent of the world’s wild tigers, but its tiger habitat has shrunk by 25 per cent in the past 10 years, and around one-third of remaining tigers struggle to survive in fragmented and vulnerable fringe forests. Major development projects threaten to diminish and fragment habitat further.
Elsewhere, in the past decade, tigers have decreased by 75 per cent in Bangladesh and gone functionally extinct in Cambodia, China, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. Again, development, logging and poaching are hampering efforts to reverse this.
This has been coming for a long time. In 1995, I warned in a WWF report: “Every week a tiger is killed in Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam). Nearly 10 per cent of Indochina’s tigers disappear annually. At this rate they could be gone in less than a decade.” Twenty years later, only a handful remain.
I hope that one day we be able to toast the recovery of the tiger, but for now, we need to stow the champagne.
