Bringing the Tiger Back from the Brink—The Six Percent Solution

TLDR

The Tiger Summit, hosted by Russia in 2010, seeks to halt the severe decline of wild tiger populations, which are at historic lows with no breeding populations in several countries, and current conservation efforts have failed to stop the decline. The paper proposes that commitments should focus on protecting tigers at well‑defined priority sites using proven best practices of law enforcement, wildlife management, and scientific monitoring to prevent extinction. The strategy involves mitigating conflicts with local people and securing commitments from tiger range states to implement targeted protection measures at priority sites. The authors argue that this targeted approach would rapidly reverse tiger decline in a cost‑efficient manner.

Abstract

The Tiger Summit, to be hosted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Russia in November 2010—the Chinese Year of the Tiger and the International Year of Biodiversity—promises to be the most significant meeting ever held to discuss the fate of a single non-human species. The Summit will culminate efforts by the Global Tiger Initiative (GTI), launched in 2008 by Robert Zoellick, World Bank President. Leaders of 13 tiger range states, supported by international donors and conservationists attending the summit, are being asked to commit to substantive measures to prevent the unthinkable: extinction of the world's last wild tiger populations. Wild tiger numbers are at an historic low. There is no evidence of breeding populations of tigers in Cambodia, China, Vietnam, and DPR Korea. Current approaches to tiger conservation are not slowing the decline in tiger numbers [1]–[3], which has continued unabated over the last two decades. While the scale of the challenge is enormous, we submit that the complexity of effective implementation is not: commitments should shift to focus on protecting tigers at spatially well-defined priority sites, supported by proven best practices of law enforcement, wildlife management, and scientific monitoring. Conflict with local people needs to be mitigated. We argue that such a shift in emphasis would reverse the decline of wild tigers and do so in a rapid and cost-efficient manner.