What WWF is doing

There are as few as 3,200 tigers surviving in the world's forests in 2010, the Chinese Year of the Tiger. WWF's Tiger Initiative aims to put in place the necessary conditions to double the wild tiger population by the next Year of the Tiger in 2022.

Putting an end to tiger poaching

WWF is working with TRAFFIC to curb the trade in tiger parts and products, so that this trade is no longer driving poaching and threatening wild tigers.

Our longer-term strategic activities include:

• Closing markets for tiger parts and products both in and outside tiger range countries, focusing on trade-routes, processors, and consumers
• Closing all existing tiger farms, especially in China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand
• Preventing any legal commercialization of dead tiger body parts
• Ensuring all tiger range countries have fully CITES-compliant national legislation and fully implement such legislation as well as other CITES Resolutions and Decisions on tigers and Asian big cats
• Establishing transboundary customs posts to foster international cooperation and liaison, focusing on the Russia/China, China/Vietnam, India/Myanmar, Bangladesh/Myanmar and India/Bangladesh borders
• Establishing and coordinating intelligence networks and ensuring intelligence-based law enforcement in strategic locations, including Southeast Asia (particularly Malaysia and Thailand), Sumatran landscapes, and the Greater Mekong Landscape (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam)
• Developing the first phase of a Global Tiger Trade Information System for overall enhanced enforcement effectiveness through better trade-route hotspot detection.

WWF is working to restore tiger populations and distributions to at least 20% of their former range in 13 priority landscapes.

This involves:

• Recovering tiger and prey populations through better management of protected areas and engaging a wider range of local stakeholders in anti-poaching measures
• Managing tiger habitat, including restoration and management of corridors between core areas through land-uses compatible with tiger conservation
• Creating additional or expanding exisiting protected areas to support viable, breeding tiger populations, and link them with habitat corridors
• Engaging business, industry, and development groups to support tiger conservation and adopt environmentally sensitive approaches that avoid negative impacts on habitat and tiger populations
• Performing economic valuations of the ecological services and sustainable use of natural resources derived from tiger landscapes to mainstream tigers and tiger conservation-related values into development planning process and policy formulation
• Strengthening community engagement in: habitat management and tiger conservation by providing economic incentives; multi-stakeholder forums to discuss, mediate, and resolve conservation issues such as land and natural resource management; revenue sharing; community-led anti-poaching strategies; and human wildlife conflict
• Using innovative wildlife research and monitoring techniques to learn more about the tiger and prey biology in order to improve tiger conservation approaches, reduce conflict, and prioritize interventions
• Establishing sustainable funding mechanisms to support tiger conservation, including from philanthropic funding, carbon financing, and government grants

WWF's Tiger Initiative is working to secure political will, action and funding to double wild tiger numbers by 2022.

A Heads of State Tiger Summit was held from November 21-24, 2010, hosted by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and World Bank President Robert Zoellick. World leaders and countries that have wild tigers endorsed a major plan to reverse the decline of wild tiger populations. Read more about what happened at the Tiger Summit.

We are working with a number of influential groups in tiger range states – including governments, regional coalitions, and international and multilateral institutions – to:

• Integrate tiger habitats into land-use plans as a legitimate category so that project and development processes will treat them as conservation areas during project planning, and employ the World Bank's 'tiger filter'
• Ensure ongoing discussions on tiger conservation into strategic engagements and developmental dialogues with governments at national, regional and local levels
• Get endorsement of transboundary agreements at highest levels of governments to address tiger landscape conservation, anti-poaching, and international trade of tiger parts
• Help to develop and capitalize a region-wide Trust Fund for tiger conservation