Posted on 21 October
201
Vladivostok, Russia – Ahead of
next month's global Tiger Summit in St.
Petersburg, the forestry administration
of Primorsky Province in the Russian Far
East is moving to open critical Amur tiger
habitats for logging.
On Oct. 26, the Forest
Management Agency of Primorsky Province
will conduct an auction for logging rights
for 16 harvest sites in the Bikinsky and
Pozharsky Pine Nut Harvesting Zones, and
the proposed Middle Ussuri wildlife reserve,
by making them available for so-called intermediate
harvesting.
Immediate harvesting
is a widely abused legal loophole which
allows loggers to cut valuable Korean pine,
oak and ash timber in protected forests.
This practice greatly increases poaching
access to remote tiger territories (through
forest road building), destroys key breeding,
feeding and overwintering habitat for tigers
and their prey, and significantly reduces
the supply of pine nuts and acorns on which
tiger prey species survive.
The logging rights up
for auction will allow loggers to cut down
forests that protect salmon breeding grounds
and are crucial habitats for Amur tigers.
The endangered Amur
tiger, numbering fewer than 500 in the wild,
is found primarily in southeastern Russia
and northern China.
Coordinator of forest
projects for the Amur Division of WWF-Russia
Anatoliy Kabanyets identified the key problem
– authorities' lack of genuine information
on the true scale of illegal logging and
its influence on region's forests.
"At the same time
that hundreds of thousands of cubic meters
of illegally logged timber are shipped to
China, and a number of loggers are even
incarcerated for illegal harvesting, on
paper the cut forests remain well-stocked
and even increase in volume every year!
The lack of consideration for actual changes
in forest conditions will lead to further
over-cutting and the destruction of our
Provincial wood supply," said Kabanyets.
Michael Stuewe, senior
consultant for WWF-US on species conservation,
noted that Primorsky Province is the homeland
of two of the most charismatic examples
of global biodiversity: in the animal kingdom
the Amur tiger, and in the plant kingdom
Korean pine.
"The world is committing
to tiger conservation this year – yet from
what I have heard here today it seems that
Primorsky Province has decided to do exactly
the opposite. The opposite even of what
Russia has asked 13 heads of state of Asian
tiger countries to come to St. Petersburg
for: protect tigers"
Read the full press release here
+ More
Tigers can provide roaring
start to action on biodiversity
Posted on 26 October
2010
Nagoya, Japan – As nations this week discuss
new targets for halting biodiversity loss,
WWF today announced that one of the world’s
most iconic species, the tiger, should be
the first hallmark of many government’s
efforts to conserve nature.
Many of the same governments
gathering in Japan this week at the meeting
of parties to the Convention on Biological
Diversity (CBD) will meet again next month
at the Tiger Summit, to be held from 21-24
November in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The Tiger Summit will
be their first major opportunity to act
on the targets agreed at the biodiversity
meeting this week. Leaders at the Tiger
Summit are expected to push forward on a
plan to double wild tiger numbers by the
next Year of the Tiger in 2022.
“As an indicator species
for forests rich in biodiversity throughout
Asia and the Russian Far East, tigers are
on the frontline of the impact of biodiversity
loss,” said Mike Baltzer, Head of WWF’s
Tigers Alive Initiative. “The Tiger Summit
will be the first test for leaders to take
action and make good on their pledges to
arrest the decline in biodiversity.”
“If we save this beautiful
and powerful icon of the forest, we can
save a lot of important biodiversity. Strong
action taken here in Nagoya will give us
the momentum to stand strong for tigers
at next month’s meeting and beyond.”
The CBD meeting comes
during both the UN Year of Biodiversity
and the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese
lunar calendar.
“Protecting the forest
areas in the 13 countries where tigers are
still found will also be a test in itself,”
stated Baltzer. “With Russia and most of
the Asian economies on the rise, we must
ensure they use their vast resources to
protect their most iconic symbol of nature.
Their increasing economic might means there
are a vast amount of resources and knowledge
available to save the tiger, and with concerted
action everyone gains – people, economies
and nature.”
Just over 100 years
ago, there were 100,000 tigers in the wild,
with its nine subspecies roaming as far
west as the Caspian Sea and as far east
as the island of Bali in Indonesia.
Today, with 93 percent
of it former habitat lost, the tiger numbers
as few as 3,200, with three subspecies already
extinct and the remaining six hanging on
in increasingly small pockets of habitat
in 13 countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia,
China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia,
Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam.
In the weeks leading
up to the Tiger Summit, WWF will outline
its plan to support the global effort for
tiger recovery. The plan focuses on protecting
the last refuges for tigers and maintaining
the larger landscapes throughout the tiger’s
range. It also tackles the drivers of the
tiger’s steep decline, which include poaching
and the lucrative illegal trade in skins
and body parts, habitat loss, conflict with
humans, and prey loss.
The Tiger Summit comes
after tiger range countries met in Indonesia
in July and presented individual national
plans to protect tigers. Those plans make
up a Global Tiger Recovery Programme – essentially
an overarching plan to double the number
of tigers in the wild – which will then
be approved at the Tiger Summit next month.
The Bali meeting was
a follow up to earlier governmental meetings
on tiger conservation. The first in Kathmandu,
Nepal in October 2009, recommended a series
of 15 global actions that need to be taken
to change the trajectory of tigers from
extinction to recovery, as well as commitments
from several tiger range countries. The
Kathmandu meeting was followed by the first
Asian ministerial conference on tiger conservation
held in Hua Hin, Thailand in January 2010,
and which adopted the goal of doubling the
number of wild tigers by 2022, the next
Year of the Tiger.
