Icon of Wild Asia Nears Extinction

ExxonMobil got involved in tiger conservation in 1993 and with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation started the Save the Tiger Fund (STF) in 1995.  I remain on the Fund's Council (board).  My fifteen year service on the board has brought me in direct contact with some of the most inspiring people, landscapes and animals on the planet.  However, despite the dedication and creativity of hundreds of conservation scientists and thousands of field staff, we are losing the battle to save the tiger in the wild.  Perhaps Prime Minister Putin's conference in St. Petersburg will turn the tide.  The World Bank is also focusing more of its environmental programming in Asia through its Global Tiger Initiative.  To me that is a more hopeful development.  The article below is from a New York Times science blog.

Leaders to Convene on Tiger Rescue

By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

With just 3,200 tigers thought to remain in the wild, time is growing short to save the species. Poaching and habitat destruction continue to imperil the tiger, which has undergone an estimated 40 percent drop in its wild population over the last decade and is now perched on the brink of extinction throughout much of its range.

Next month, however, officials from the remaining countries with wild tigers will gather in St. Petersburg, Russia, for a major conference on how to reverse the decline of the species. A draft declaration for the summit sets a goal of doubling the wild tiger population by 2022, and conservationists and biologists have high hopes for the gathering.

The summit conference “promises to be the most significant meeting ever held to discuss the fate of a single non-human species,” a group of tiger experts declared in September, in the preface of a major new report charting the tiger’s perilous condition.

Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has already agreed to attend the event and has been a critical force behind its development. His presence is expected to draw numerous heads of state and high-level delegations from the 13 “tiger range” nations.

“He has been a huge leader in this process,” Barney Long, tiger program manager for the World Wildlife Fund, said. “He really is the champion of all this.”

Mr. Putin has previously shown interest in preserving Russia’s population of Siberian tigers, of which only a few hundred remain. In 2008 he visited tiger habitat in the Russian Far East to observe a tiger-tracking project; during the trip, a camouflage-clad Mr. Putin is said to have used a tranquilizer gun to shoot and sedate a tiger that had escaped from restraints and threatened a camera crew.

The tiger summit conference in St. Petersburg would probably benefit from some similar hands-on involvement by Mr. Putin, as several touchy issues will be in play. Chief among them will be how to bolster efforts to crack down on poaching and the illegal trafficking of tiger parts.

Demand for tiger products remains high in Asian countries, particularly China and Vietnam, where tiger-bone tonics and other illegal products are status symbols. The penalty for poaching a Siberian tiger in China is death, but few tigers remain in the country, and most tiger products are smuggled in from elsewhere.

Were poaching reined in, enough habitat exists for tigers to increase their numbers nearly 10-fold, some experts suggest.

“There’s a lot of forest and habitat out there with no tigers, and the only reason for that is poaching,” Mr. Long said. “It really is the poaching and the trafficking that is the axis of destruction.”

Poaching continues to be a problem even in Russia, where Siberian tiger numbers have declined by an estimated 15 percent in the last five years, probably because of reduced enforcement efforts, according to a recent joint study by Cambridge University, the World Bank and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The study concluded that the focus for preservation of the tiger should be on 42 “source sites” in Russia, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Laos, where tiger populations are highly concentrated and breeding females exist in high enough numbers to allow for recovery.

“With 70 percent of the world’s wild tigers in just 6 percent of their current range, efforts need to focus on securing these sites as the number one priority for the species,” Joe Walston, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Asian programs, said in a statement accompanying the study.