Saving Wild Tigers
RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THE KATHMANDU GLOBAL TIGER WORKSHOP 2009
“Saving wild tigers is our test. If we pass, we get to keep the planet.” (October 30, 2009)
Preamble
Tigers
are symbols of all that is powerful, mystical, and beautiful in
nature. As an apex species, they reflect the health of the
ecosystems in which they live and on which people depend.
Unfortunately, adverse human activities have driven wild tigers to the
brink of extinction. Over the past century, their numbers fell
from 100,000 to about 3,500 today. These remaining tigers live in
small refuges scattered across their once-vast domain in Asia.
Without immediate, urgent, and transformational actions, wild tigers
will disappear forever.
More than 250 experts on tigers and
participants from 13 of the 14 tiger range countries met in Kathmandu,
Nepal, from October 27-30, 2009. We identified the
transformational actions that will stop the tiger’s decline and achieve
the goal of doubling the population of wild tigers within the next ten
years.
We believe that collective political commitment from all
levels of government is the first and most important action required to
save wild tigers.
Recommendations
We recommend the following:
1.Celebrate
2010, Year of the Tiger, throughout the world, to create global
awareness of the critical plight of the wild tiger and enlist broad and
deep support for their conservation.
2.Ensure strict protection of wild tigers and their core breeding areas.
3.Conserve and manage buffer zones and corridors that connect core tiger breeding areas in tiger landscapes.
4.Tiger
range countries stop infrastructure projects in core tiger breeding
areas and finance institutions avoid financing development projects
that adversely affect critical tiger habitats.
5.Empower local
communities that live in and around tiger landscapes with sustainable
economic incentives and appropriate technologies to minimize
human-tiger conflict.
6.Make core/critical tiger habitats truly inviolate by incentive-driven, generous, participatory, and voluntary relocation.
7.All
countries implement CITES resolution Conf. 12.5 “Conservation of and
trade in tigers and other Appendix I Asian big cat species.”
8.Enhance
the capacity of INTERPOL, the World Customs Organization (WCO), the UN
Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the CITES Secretariat, and regional
wildlife enforcement networks (including ASEAN-WEN) to more effectively
and sustainably combat the illegal trade in wildlife at the
international level and through relevant national agencies; and
implement the Manifesto on Combating Wildlife Crime in Asia, decided in
Pattaya, Thailand, in April, 2009.
9.Conduct focused outreach
to target audiences to reduce demand for tiger parts and enhance demand
for live tigers living in the wild.
10.The international
community makes a financial commitment to support long-term
behaviour-change campaigns with measureable outcomes on tiger
conservation in the wild.
11.Intensify regional cooperation for better management and enforcement in transboundary tiger landscapes.
12.Implement capacity development programs to achieve effective landscape and protected-area management.
13.Use innovative science and technology to closely monitor and protect wild tigers and their prey and habitats.
14.Adopt innovative, sustainable mechanisms to finance wild tiger conservation.
15.Generate
collective support for tiger range countries from the international
donor community to reverse the decline of wild tigers now.
We
thank the Government of Nepal and the organizers and sponsors of the
Kathmandu Global Tiger Workshop 2009 for their support and commitment
to this transformational event.
These recommendations will be
presented to the ministers of the tiger range countries, who will meet
in Thailand in January 2010. We expect the ministers at that
meeting to agree to these transformational wild tiger conservation
measures and submit the appropriately updated national action plans to
heads of governments of the tiger range countries for approval prior to
their summit in Vladivostok, Russia in the Fall of 2010, to ensure
continued long-term global political commitment and action to saving
wild tigers. We will subsequently work with even greater resolve
to conserve wild tigers throughout their range. With this, we
will pass our test to keep the planet.
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