Making space for tigers and people on a crowded planet

For Dr. Sejal Worah, protecting tigers has always meant so much more than saving a single species. In her role as Programme Director for WWF-India, she’s had a front-row seat in witnessing how tiger conservation connects with ecosystem recovery at large. 

From being ‘on the ground’ as the world came together for tigers in 2010 to capturing evidence of a tiger using a forest she helped restore many years later, the past 12 years in tiger conservation have come full circle for Dr. Sejal.

12 years later, how do you feel about the future of tiger recovery?

The fact that some tiger range countries are on track to achieving or have already achieved the ‘doubling tiger numbers’ goal is a very significant achievement. While most species are in decline still, here we have a species that we seem to have bent the curve on, and that in itself is something to celebrate. So on one level, I’m optimistic. 

What I’m worried about is that whenever we get complacent or lose momentum, we start to see how easy it is for the situation to slip back. We’ve seen that with tigers in India — once you take your eyes off the ball, especially if poaching is not addressed, you can wipe out an entire tiger population quite quickly, which would bring us back to square one. 

Today, tiger recovery, particularly in this part of the world, is also deeply connected to human wildlife coexistence. We’re dealing with limited space, climate change impacts, and a whole host of other threats. So in these situations, we really have to think about how to manage the future scenario. The good news is the past 12-years have given us plenty of lessons and examples to adapt and pull from. 

Tracking how tigers move across landscapes must require a whole lot of data. How has data used in tiger conservation changed over the past 12 years? 

I did all my early conservation research pre-camera trap days so it’s possible to do but when you look at the technology available today, it just blows your mind. Still, even though we have these new innovative tools, what I've found is that while the data and knowledge you generate through this technology is crucially important for tiger conservation, it's how you use it that makes all the difference. 

For me, one of the most revealing things was when we put the first radio collars on tigers and started looking at how they behave. A whole world opened up. Tigers were remarkable, the way they were living in such close proximity with people, biding their time, their distance, and changing their movement patterns across villages and highways. We uncovered so much important data through this technology. 

But there is still so much we don’t know. Here in India, where tiger numbers are still increasing alongside a growing human population, we need to learn more about these movement patterns to see how we can find a way for coexistence on a crowded planet. 

Keeping this in mind, we need to remember that one of our biggest sources of knowledge is with the people who have been living with tigers across the country. 

Looking across the tiger’s range, estimates suggest nearly 47 million people live in tiger landscapes, and an additional 85 million are estimated to live within 10 kilometres of these areas. Their voices need to be central to future global tiger recovery efforts — we cannot take their support for granted. We need to understand tiger behaviour and the future of people living alongside them and put together this jigsaw puzzle for what it means to secure a future for tigers and people.

What more needs to be done in the next 12 years to adequately address human tiger conflict? 

We need to think about how to ensure that people who bear the price of conservation — the people on the ground living closest to wildlife — are the biggest beneficiaries of conservation. It’s about rights, governance, compensation, incentives and so much more. It’s extremely complex, and that’s what we’re addressing. 

On a day to day basis, we are working with people living near tiger habitats to see how we can have a fairer, more equitable and inclusive approach towards conservation. It’s all of us in it together. 

Among other achievements, you’ve helped create Jabarkhet Nature Reserve, the first-ever privately owned and operated wildlife sanctuary in Uttarakhand. Can you tell us a little about what drove you to pursue this initiative?

So Jabarkhet is a 110-acre private nature reserve, the first of its kind in the state of Uttarakhand, where I live. Today, it’s among the few sites in India classified as an ‘Other effective area-based conservation measure’ (OECM), which means it’s part of a new conservation approach separate from protected areas. This approach is helping communities across the world come together to support their countries' delivery on the United Nation’s Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a set of targets to steer the planet towards reversing and halting nature loss by 2030.

From there, things just grew organically from conversations with the land owners, forest users, and local communities. We were thinking about how to create a model where ‘conservation pays’ and where people who own these tracts of forests, be it a community or a private individual, can see that this forest has value beyond the land and timber. 

Lots of people read about ‘rewilding’ but you saw it happen with your very own eyes at Jabarkhet. What did this look like? 

Once we began reducing the pressure on the area — removing the exotic invasive weed, controlling the logging and grass cutting, and managing grazing — nature simply started doing its own thing. 

Within the first year, we saw the grassland returning, flowers blooming below, berries growing above, and mushrooms sprouting. We’re talking about 120 species of mushrooms, 350 species of flowering plants and 40-50 species of grasses that started emerging over time. Slowly, I even saw the forest canopy closing above me. 

Then the wildlife came back. Seeing this happen was something I simply cannot explain. We saw droppings from barking deer, wild boar, martens and porcupine, to name only a few of the mammals. Why? Because we removed a lot of exotic weeds, which brought the herbivores back. With prey returning, the leopards came back. Shortly after, the Himalayan black bear came back after 40 years and we captured evidence of a mother and her cub stopping by a waterhole.

In front of my eyes, I’ve seen this whole cycle of how an ecosystem can recover, of how nature can get destroyed and then restored all over again. It has been great to see.

Is there a tiger conservation lesson in this story?

Well, not many people know this yet but this is a timely question. I was sitting one fine day and going through our camera trap images from the reserve. I remember sitting there deleting all the extra shots in the camera. So there I was, hitting delete, delete, delete, delete…until I saw this stripey thing. I remember thinking:“Ok…hang on, is that a tiger?”

I didn’t think it was possible, and I questioned if I was hallucinating after going through so many camera trap images. So I shut the computer down, waited and took a few deep breaths. When I started the computer up again, it was still there. A tiger had really made its way to Jabarkhet Nature Reserve, within a few years since we began restoring it. It’s impossible to put into words what you feel in moments like this — it makes everything worthwhile and shows the immense value of restoring these ‘stepping stone’ forests. 

I called a colleague who was able to confirm that it was a young male who must have been pushed out somewhere in the plains and started walking uphill and had made its way onto this mountain. This tiger could travel to our reserve because it had pathways to do so — which speaks to the connectivity of landscapes. 

Any words of inspiration to anybody with access to a piece of land that they have the potential to restore? 

In the world today, every piece of land that we can protect and restore is important. There’s going to be so much pressure on nature in the coming years that there is no such thing as an area too small. My message to people is to just do it — find your own model and simply get on with it.

To you, what is the most important factor in tiger recovery?

We need will — from politicians and from people on the ground. If I look at India today, the only reason we have what we still have is that there’s a culture of conservation at all levels. If political will was not there at the end of the day, we would have destroyed everything. 

Today, we have laws that work, we have money going into conservation of tigers and other species in general. I’ve worked in countries where conservation is mainly driven by outside entities and aid agencies. That’s not sustainable. We need to create a situation where governments and people of the country genuinely believe that biodiversity is important to have and conserve. 

At the end of the day, people and the government are the ones who are going to save their heritage. So we’ve got to find ways for them to care enough to be able to put in the investment that’s needed to make this happen at scale.