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Hope For The Tiger: Population Increase Boosts Chances For A Rebound By 2022

By Shelley Hazen
Published on: 05:50 PST, Apr 11, 2016

In 1900, 100,000 tigers roamed the Earth. Today, conservationists are excited that an estimated 3,890 now live in the wild, because that number represents the first time the population has increased in 100 years.

Although slight, the population increase is a sign that humankind is helping endangered tigers bounce back from the brink. The 3,890 figure is a hopeful boost from the all-time low of 3,200 estimated six years ago, CBS News reported.

This doesn’t mean that the animal is out of danger, but it’s a hopeful sign that one day its population will bounce back.

“More important than the absolute numbers is the trend, and we’re seeing the trend going in the right direction,” said Ginette Hemley, the senior vice president of wildlife conservation at the World Wildlife Fund. “It’s a positive trend. We’re cautiously hopeful.”

The population increase is no fluke; it is the result of intense and determined conservation efforts by 13 countries that are home to tigers. Back in 2010, a global summit, the Asia Ministerial Conference on Tiger Conservation, was called in response to the dire population figures.

Countries that attended set a goal: to boost the number of wild tigers to 6,000 by 2022. The world is now at the halfway point of that goal, United Press International reported; 2022 is the Year of the Tiger on the Chinese calendar.

Although the population increase is encouraging, conservationists are actually behind the pace to achieve that goal, but they may still have a good chance of reaching it.

The countries that have most heavily invested in achieving this goal have seen the most promising boosts in population. Russia, India, Bhutan, and Nepal all have more tigers than they counted in previous surveys.

“When you have high-level political commitments, it can make all the difference,” Hemley said. “When you have well protected habitat and you control the poaching, tigers will recover. That’s a pretty simple formula. We know it works.”

Even in Cambodia, where tigers were recently declared extinct, there’s hope: the government is planning to reintroduce them into the wild.

But tigers aren’t doing well everywhere. Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam have single-digit numbers, and the population in Bangladesh is hundreds less than it was in 2010, the Christian Science Monitor added. And the human threats that have cleaved the population so drastically haven’t disappeared — their numbers have increased despite them.

Tigers’ habitats are being whittled away as the countries that host them tear down forests to pursue development. Poachers are also a huge problem, as they hunt the creatures for their body parts, which are then sold on the black market and turned into furniture, wine, rugs, meat, traditional medicine, and jewelry,

A coalition of non-governmental groups has joined forces to curtail poaching and eliminate the demand, mostly in China, for these products. About 7,000 tigers live on farms for this purpose.

“There are still some areas we have declining populations, and overall we have a long way to go, but we can celebrate this reversing of the downward trend,” said the WWF’s Nilanga Jayasinghe.

It should be noted that the population may only appear to have grown because conservationists are now aware of the tigers thanks to better surveys, and their lands are still fragmented and small, Scientific American noted.

But the WWF’s Hemley thinks the 2022 goal is “doable.” Bolstering her hope is a report released last week of recent satellite imagery used to monitor the range of tigers in Asia. These images revealed less loss than they expected. If forest restoration and reintroduction plans work, the 2022 goal could definitely be possible.

[Image via Destinyweddingstudio/Shutterstock]

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