NEW DELHI: Countries with wild tiger populations have agreed to do more to protect tiger habitats that are shrinking drastically because of deforestation and urban sprawl, conservationists said Friday.
Representatives from the 13 Asian countries with tigers, meeting this week in New Delhi, issued a resolution acknowledging that the forests in which tigers live are inherently valuable themselves and worthy of protection. These forests can help preserve economic growth by safeguarding water supplies, improving air quality and providing homes for not only tigers but also birds, frogs and other mammals.
“Before, there’s always been this conflict of development versus conservation, as if countries had to choose,” said Sejal Worah, the program director for World Wildlife Fund in India.
“But in this resolution, it clearly states that natural capital is important to the economy of a country,” she said. “Countries understand that preserving tiger habitats does not compromise growth. And that’s important. That’s new.”
The world’s tiger countries are all in Asia: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Nepal, Malaysia, Myanmar, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam. India has the most by far, with about 2,500.
None of the others have more than 500 and some have just a few. Many of the countries have growing human populations and fast-developing economies.
By 2022, they want to double the world’s wild tiger population from the all-time low of 3,200 hit in 2010. In 2014, the world’s tiger count went up to 3,890, marking the first increase in the wild population census in more than a century.
But that did not necessarily mean there were more tigers in the wild. The higher number may just mean scientists are getting better at counting them, with more sophisticated survey methods including camera traps and DNA analysis of scat.
An actual increase in wild tiger populations would also be hard to reconcile with the fact that their habitat is shrinking so fast. In just the last five years, tigers lost a full 40 percent of their remaining natural habitat, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Cambodia this year declared its tiger population “functionally extinct,” meaning it had no breeding tigers left in the wild. While in New Delhi this week, Cambodia’s agriculture minister reportedly looked into repopulating the Southeast Asian country with Indian tigers.
India is ready to help, Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said. “India is willing to cooperate with any country which does not have or has lost its tiger population in the course of history,” he said Thursday.
India, home to about two-thirds of the world’s wild tigers, also agreed to strengthen controls against cross-border wildlife crimes, including trafficking in animals and animal parts such as tiger skins and bones and rhino horns.
Tiger countries agree to preserve big-cat habitats
Tiger countries agree to preserve big-cat habitats
A month on, flood-struck Aceh still reels from worst disaster since 2004 tsunami
- Aceh accounts for almost half of death toll in Sumatra floods that struck in November
- Over 450,000 remain displaced as of Friday, as governor extended state of emergency
JAKARTA: Four weeks since floodwaters and torrents of mud swept across Aceh province, villages are still overwhelmed with debris while communities remain inundated, forced to rely on each other to speed up recovery efforts.
The deadly floods and landslides, triggered by extreme weather linked to Cyclone Senyar, hit the provinces of North Sumatra, West Sumatra and Aceh in late November.
Aceh, the westernmost province of Indonesia, was the worst-hit. Accounting for almost half of the 1,137 death toll, a month later more than 450,000 people are still unable to return to their homes, as many struggle to access clean water, food, electricity and medical supplies.
“We saw how people resorted to using polluted river water for their needs,” Ira Hadiati, Aceh coordinator for the Medical Emergency Rescue Committee, or MER-C, told Arab News on Friday.
Many evacuation shelters were also lacking toilets and washing facilities, while household waste was “piling up on people’s lawns,” she added.
In many regions, people’s basic needs “were still unmet,” said Annisa Zulkarnain, a volunteer with Aceh-based youth empowerment organization Svara.
“Residents end up helping each other and that’s still nowhere near enough, and even with volunteers there are still some limitations,” she told Arab News.
Volunteers and aid workers in Aceh have grown frustrated with the central government’s response, which many have criticized as slow and ineffective.
And Jakarta continues to ignore persistent calls to declare the Sumatra floods a national disaster, which would unlock emergency funds and help streamline relief efforts.
“It seems like there’s a gap between the people and the government, where the government is saying that funds and resources have been mobilized … but the fact on the ground shows that even to fix the bridges, it’s been ordinary people working together,” Zulkarnain said.
After spending the past two weeks visiting some of the worst-affected areas, she said that the government “really need to speed up” their recovery efforts.
Aceh Gov. Muzakir Manaf extended the province’s state of emergency for another two weeks starting Friday, while several district governments have declared themselves incapable of managing the disasters.
Entire villages were wiped out by the disastrous floods, which have also damaged more than 115,000 houses across Aceh, along with 141 health facilities, 49 bridges, and over 1,300 schools.
The widespread damage to roads and infrastructure continue to isolate many communities, with residents traveling for hours on foot or with motorbikes in search of basic supplies.
“Even today, some areas are still inundated by thick mud and there are remote locations still cut off because the bridges collapsed. For access, off-road vehicles are still required or we would use small wooden boats to cross rivers,” Al Fadhil, director of Geutanyoe Foundation, told Arab News.
“From our perspective, disaster management this time around is much worse compared to how it was when the 2004 tsunami happened.”
When the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami struck in 2004, Aceh was the hardest-hit of all, with the disasters killing almost 170,000 people in the province.
But MER-C’s Hadiati said that the impact of the November floods and landslides is “more extensive and far worse than the tsunami,” as 18 Acehnese cities and regencies have been affected — about twice more than in the 2004 disaster.
As Friday marks 21 years since the cataclysmic tsunami, Fadhil said the current disaster management was “disorganized,” and lacked leadership and coordination from the central government, factors that played a crucial role after 2004.
“The provincial and district governments in Aceh, they’ve now done all they could with what they have,” he said.
“But their efforts stand against the fact that there’s no entry of foreign aid, no outside support, and a central government insisting they are capable.”
