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22 August 2022

Press Release

For immediate release

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Restoring Asia’s Roar: Enormous potential to expand tiger range and boost nature recovery

  • WWF research reveals tiger range has the potential to increase by an additional 1.7 million km2, more than double its current size 
  • Range recovery areas include 10 current tiger range countries and five where tigers are believed to have gone extinct  
  • Tigers have lost an estimated 95% of their historic range in the past 100 years 

A new WWF report has found that the range of wild tigers could be more than doubled in Asia if the conditions are right, allowing tigers to potentially move into areas totalling around seven times the size of the UK.  

The report, Restoring Asia’s Roar: Opportunities for tiger recovery across their historic range, analyses and maps the opportunities for tiger range recovery across 30 current and former range countries based on the relationship between tiger presence and intensity of human activity. It suggests that there are expanses of currently unoccupied but potentially suitable tiger habitat across 15 countries. 

Tiger range has shrunk by almost 95% over the past 100 years and since 1850 tigers have been lost from at least 14 countries. This includes Vietnam, Lao PDR, and Cambodia where tigers are believed to have gone extinct in just the last 25 years. Due to poaching and the loss of important prey species, the reduction in tiger range continues and the area where tigers are found has declined by approximately 50% since 1994. 

According to the report, around half of the range recovery areas are within 100km of current tiger populations — well within the distance that tigers are known to naturally spread out. This highlights the potential for tigers to move into these areas themselves, provided they can reach them and there is sufficient prey. 

Becci May, Senior Programme Advisor, Asia Programmes, WWF-UK, said: 

“Tigers used to roam across most of Asia, but they’re now restricted to around 5% of their historic range. That area is continuing to shrink, and tigers are still the most threatened big cat species globally despite some countries making progress on wild tiger numbers in recent years.  

“There is enormous potential to increase the tiger’s range, which would help people and other wildlife at the same time. Protecting and expanding tiger habitat would boost global efforts to halt and reverse nature loss and help store carbon. Let’s help bring our world back to life by restoring the tiger’s roar.” 

Recent evidence that tigers will move into new areas if they can has been gathered in the Himalayan foothills of Bhutan and eastern Nepal. In 2020, cameras in Nepal’s Ilam district captured a tiger at 3,165m — the highest documented altitude for tigers in the country and 250 km east of Nepal’s known tiger range. 

In potential recovery areas where tigers have gone extinct, such as Cambodia, Kazakhstan, and Lao PDR, active reintroduction may be the only choice for tiger recovery. Efforts to fulfil a landmark plan to restore tigers in Kazakhstan by 2025 are already underway, beginning with prey base restoration and consultations with local communities. 

The report highlights that many of the potential recovery areas, such as the Cardamom rainforest in Southwest Cambodia, also serve as critical carbon sinks. Protecting these biodiversity strongholds, and other important landscapes, for tiger recovery would generate significant ecological benefits for people, other wildlife, and the planet. These include mitigating climate change, safeguarding water catchment areas and reducing disaster risk. 

WWF is calling on tiger range countries to include range expansion targets in their commitments for the Global Tiger Recovery Program (2022 - 2034). However, the report stresses that expanding tiger landscapes will only be successful with the full backing and participation of local communities. 

ENDS

Images and maps available here.   

The report is available here

NOTES TO EDITORS  

  • Potential expansion areas identified in the study are within the 10 countries where wild tigers still roam (India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, Thailand) and also five historical tiger range countries (Cambodia, Kazakhstan, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Pakistan and Vietnam). 
  • Authors used data of human impact on the planet (Human Modification Index or HMI) to identify landscapes which might have opportunities for future tiger range expansion.  
  • Places with higher average human pressures on occupied tiger habitat included India, Bangladesh and Nepal, with the lowest values in Russia and Myanmar. South Asia accounted for a higher HMI score, followed by Southeast Asia and East Asia. The potential future tiger range, taking into account human impact, spans an additional 1.7 million km2  in 15 countries - which would be a more than 250% increase. 
  • The current tiger range is the approximate distribution of breeding tigers and covers ~650,000km2 across 10 countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, and Thailand. 
  • The historic tiger range is estimated to have covered ~11,800,000km2 across 30 countries: the ten listed above as well as Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lao PDR, North Korea, Pakistan, South Korea, Singapore, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. 
  • Around half of the expansion areas were within 100km of current tiger populations, highlighting that in many landscapes range expansion could be driven by the natural dispersal of tigers provided connectivity is maintained or enhanced. 
  • 21% of expansion areas globally are within protected areas.  
  • Tiger conservation needs to be prioritised at the highest levels of government across Southeast Asia if this region's tiger decline is to be reversed. The establishment of national tiger committees — chaired by the head of governments — is a proven means of raising the political profile of tigers and achieving major conservation gains both in the short term and long term.  
  • In 2010, when global wild tiger numbers had dipped to as few as 3,200, leaders from 13 tiger range countries came together to set out a goal to double the species’ population by 2022, the next Lunar Year of the Tiger. 
  • There were approximately 3,900 wild tigers as of 2016 - the year marking the halfway point in the 12-year goal to double wild tigers. The new IUCN Red List account for tigers, which was released in July 2022, provided an estimate of approximately 4,500 wild tigers. This was based on a compilation of published and unpublished country-specific estimates which had been collected across multiple years. The next global tiger estimate is expected in late 2022 following updates from multiple tiger range countries in the coming months including Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Russia. Nepal was the first to release updated numbers on Global Tiger Day, 29 July 2022 and announced they had more than doubled their wild tiger population in just over a decade to 355 individuals.  
  • WWF’s 2017 report Beyond the Stripes – Save Tigers Save So Much More highlighted how in conserving tigers we also conserve some of the world’s richest ecosystems, bringing benefits for other wildlife and humans. Forest landscapes protected for tigers store more carbon than other forests in the region, helping to mitigate climate change. Tiger habitats overlap nine globally important watersheds, which supply water to as many as 830 million people. They also provide disaster risk reduction against flooding, tidal surge and landslides. 

About the Global Tiger Initiative  

The Global Tiger Initiative (GTI) was launched in 2008 as a global alliance of governments, international organisations, civil society, the conservation and scientific communities and the private sector, with the aim of working together to save wild tigers from extinction. It seeks to empower tiger range countries to address the entire spectrum of threats, domestic as well as those that are transboundary in nature, and work toward increased financial sustainability through the integration of conservation objectives into development. 

Why tigers matter 

As the world’s largest cat and an apex predator, tigers play a significant role in the structure and function of the ecosystem on which both humans and wildlife rely. They are a “landscape” species, needing large areas with diverse habitats, free from human disturbance and rich in prey. Success or failure means more than securing the future of a single iconic species – it sets a precedent for how we will consider and prioritise the health of nature in global development and in a changing climate going forward. For more information see: wwf.org.uk/learn/wildlife/tigers  

Adopting a tiger through WWF helps support the following work:      

  • Help to secure well-managed protected areas    
  • Advocate for and support the maintenance and restoration of wildlife corridors, helping wild tiger populations to thrive    
  • Collaborate with local communities to help them to protect wildlife and their livelihoods, as they live alongside wildlife     
  • Conduct camera trap surveys to be able to track population trends and guide conservation action     
  • support.wwf.org.uk/adopt-a-tiger 

About WWF:  

WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature) is one of the world’s largest independent conservation organisations, active in nearly 100 countries.   

Our supporters – more than five million of them – are helping us to restore nature and to tackle the main causes of nature’s decline, particularly the food system and climate change. We’re working to ensure a world with thriving habitats and species, and to change hearts and minds so it becomes unacceptable to overuse our planet’s resources.   

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