AN APPRAISAL OF FINANCIAL SHORTFALLS IN TIGER CONSERVATION – (WITH SPECIAL FOCUS ON PROTECTION)
Wild tiger agenda across Tiger Range Country requires adequate and sustained funding support for Global Tiger Recovery Programme implementation. There is a big gap in terms of financial support to the wild tiger which requires prioritized bridging. Over the vicissitude of time, as a sequel to ongoing global landscape transformations, the tiger is no longer arithmetic of any one single government department. Rather, a multi-sectoral approach operating at a macro-tiger landscape level is warranted to address protected areas, general forests, rural interface areas and urbanscapes. This entails envisioning a landscape approach for engaging with several stakeholders operating in a tiger landscape with varied land uses warranting tiger filters. Such an engagement requires considerable investment both in tiger Protected Area and beyond, with an overarching masterplan and monitoring architecture identified within the governance system in vogue. No single agency or donor may be in a position to sustain such an effort, but an enabling policy regime of a Tiger Range Country, legitimizing the approach can support the creation of a regional trust fund for obtaining assured complementary support to sovereign funding in the long run.
The Global Tiger Forum embarked on a project to identify the minimum financial resource needs for the implementation of tiger conservation efforts at the grassroots levels. The findings present an overall scenario of tiger governance, major threats, and gaps in funding vis-à-vis the Global Tiger Recovery Programme (GTRP) is based on a derived “normative template”, which has been fine-tuned for multiple forest types spread across the tiger range. The dataset for the said assessment has been structured through information received from TRCs, direct consultations, and a review of the GTRP portfolio.
The global financial gap in wild tiger conservation funding is at least 138.477 million USD during the year 2020, for all tiger, protected areas (source sites excluding Protected Areas in Indonesia). This covers both recurring and nonrecurring items of expenditure in field formations, which are a regular feature in tiger governance. Thus, the figures (gap) computed for the year 2020 may be taken as a base year value to project the said gap over a time period. The computed shortfall is almost 0.019% of the total shortfall in the global biodiversity financing gap (average gap of US$ 711 billion per year) as estimated by Deutz et al. (2020).
The report also lists out possible financing strategies to meet the ascertained gap, ranging from traditional sovereign funds to complementary financing from multiple stakeholders and structuring an innovative financial architecture for ensuring the perpetuity of resources.
For more details, please refer to the report.