It's could be terrible news for the world's last tigers.
The construction of thousands of kilometres of railways and roads across Asia will put the world’s few remaining tigers at risk, conservationists have warned. Infrastructure development that fails to incorporate the needs of vulnerable tiger populations would be a devastating blow to years of painstaking but successful tiger conservation efforts.
Tigers need large areas of land to roam, and the current plans would cut up their territories, having a fatal impact on their capacity to hunt and mate, according to a damning WWF report.
Tiger numbers have bounced back from an all-time low of 3,200 in 2010, to around 3,890 now. "The potential impact of the linear infrastructure may be way beyond a setback - this could dismantle the progress we’ve made over 20-30 years," said Dr Ashley Brooks, a co-author of The Road Ahead, which explores the future of tiger conservation. "The scale is astronomical."
There is hope, however.
The WWF has laid out economically viable plans (p.16 - 18) for infrastructure development in Thailand and Myanmar that would keep tiger territories connected without preventing human development. Please sign this petition to demand that the governments of Thailand and Myanmar enact these plans, and save the tigers from extinction.
