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Staving off extinction: A decade of investments to Save The World's Last Wild Tigers

Executive Summary

This is the first quantitative evaluation of the performance of $12.6 million invested by Save The Tiger Fund in more than 250 grants in 13 out of 14 tiger range countries. This amount represents almost one third of all the grant funds applied specifically to in situ tiger conservation between 1995 and 2004. The largest contributions to this effort came from ExxonMobil and its subsidiaries, which donated nearly $12 million to Save The Tiger Fund between 1995 and 2004, representing the largest corporate commitments to saving a species.

After a decade of investments, there were many successes and some failures, but on average, Save The Tiger Fund grantees managed to accomplish their original objectives more than satisfactorily. Save The Tiger Fund invested in the following threat-mitigating activities: 1) Scientific research of tiger ecology and monitoring of tiger numbers to improve our understanding of their needs (31%); 2) Education and outreach activities to build public support for tiger conservation (27%); 3) Anti-poaching patrols to enforce laws in protected areas (13%); 4) Leadership training to emerging M.S. and Ph.D.-level conservation leaders (6%); 5) Trafficking reduction activities to combat the global demand for and supply of tiger parts (5%); 6) Habitat restoration and acquisition (5%); 7) Sustainable development projects that improve livelihoods of people living in tiger landscapes (5%); 8) Zoo breeding programs to secure genetically viable populations of tiger subspecies in the world’s zoos (4%); and 9) Human-tiger conflict reduction (4%).

Over the course of the decade, Save The Tiger Fund helped conservationists to change the conservation paradigm from one that focused exclusively on protected areas to a larger, landscape-level approach that weaves together protected core areas with human-tiger friendly habitats like multiple-use forest buffer zones connected to each other by habitat corridors. The two most successful examples of this work also received the bulk of Save The Tiger Fund’s investments: the Russian Far East (21%) and the Terai Arc Landscape of Nepal and India (11%). A landscape-level vision has been developed in both these places that has buy-in from many different NGOs and their respective governments. These collaborative, problem-solving strategies involved many different organizations that successfully worked together to stabilize tiger populations.

Despite these successes, the evaluation highlights room for improvement. Grantees should be encouraged to work at appropriate temporal and spatial scales. They should be encouraged to focus on real conservation outcomes for tigers and to quantify those by using meaningful indicators. If this aspect of the program is strengthened, Save The Tiger Fund will be able to conduct a more quantitative meta-evaluation of its progress over the next 10 years. Grantees have disseminated their findings widely, but Save The Tiger Fund should also play a more active role to encourage grantees to look within and beyond their own back yards for conservation methods and best practices that have been established by others, and to learn from that experience rather than “reinventing the wheel.”

Given that Save The Tiger Fund provided about one third of the funding to tiger conservation efforts since 1995, the evaluators believe that Save The Tiger Fund can take some credit for larger landscape-level success stories such as those of the Russian Far East and the Terai Arc landscape. Without this conservation financing mechanism and the conservation partnerships that it fostered, tigers would be much worse off today.

In order to duplicate these successes, Save The Tiger Fund will need to select grant portfolios that compliment each other and encourage grantees to work to their institutional strengths and to encourage collaborative landscape-level partnerships that will have outcomes greater than the sum of their parts. Save The Tiger Fund should work to provide additional financing mechanisms for tiger conservation or to narrow the geographical scope of its existing investments to ensure that they result in meaningful landscape-level improvements.

Also see this related paper in Environmental Conservation.