Saving the wild

Rendezvous

The belief that wildlife tourism can help protect wildlife and gain community support, coupled with a concern for plummeting tiger numbers across Asia, led Julian Matthews to set up Travel Operators for Tigers (TOFT) in 2004. Today, the organisation has over 220 travel businesses involved - from around the globe, and has developed a UN-backed programme for accommodation providers in wild and rural areas.

In an email interaction, he tells Shweta Sharma about nature tourism and its benefits, and adds that people and politics are the biggest roadblocks on the way to tiger conservation.

Excerpts:

How can nature tourism help in tiger conservation?

Nature tourism is already doing a job for conservation today, with well-known tiger habitats now having higher densities of tigers, greater park fee revenues for protection and communities, and tens of thousands of local jobs where there were none before. It’s no surprise that tiger numbers are up in park with good visitor numbers, and down in states like Odisha with low visitors numbers, and very low or extinct in countries that never had ‘nature tourism’ like Vietnam, China, Laos, Cambodia and Burma. ‘If it pays, it stays’ is a mantra used by many of us around the world. However tourism in India has happened by default. This is because, historically, the forest departments (and legal regulations) had restricted it and considered it as a threat rather than seeing it as a powerful opportunity for habitat restoration, conservation-based investment, community support and rural economic renewal. The result is that much of nature tourism is often of poor quality, doing a disservice to its local environment and nature education and failing in its ‘ecotourism mantra’.

Why have you focused your work on tigers? There are other wildlife species who require as much attention, or perhaps even more.

Tiger is just the apex predator – and under its protection, with its overarching draw power — we can stimulate conservation of many other critical habitats and all its wild inhabitants. By saving one key species, we can save or restore whole wildernesses. Few creatures have this power, and none have the tigers’ visitor pulling power!

India’s wildlife population faces a lot of challenges like poaching and deforestation. How, in such cases, can tourism help?

India needs a whole new approach and attitude towards this industry by forest departments, the media, and planners. We need new models for nature tourism to ensure economic returns, support protection, stimulate nature education, and allow citizen advocacy to be successful in changing the threats before Indian wildlife. This is both in and around protected areas, but also the 2,00,000 square kms of unloved, uncared for and unprotected forests across India. It needs new laws and incentives for people to invest in, better long-term planning and monitoring to ensure sustainable development, and new partnerships with local communities and potential investors. We should be thinking in terms of ‘Smart Forests’, much like we think and invest in ‘Smart cities’.

What are the basic things one can do to ensure wildlife protection?

Nature tourism cannot not exist in a vacuum. It will only be a viable conservation tool if its alongside good planning, has good management, strong protection and viable habitat, and ensures communities affected by wildlife are the chief beneficiaries of the new economics. Cooperation and partnership will always work better than restrictions and draconian regulations on both communities and nature tourism to ensure habitat conservation and protection.

What is the hardest part about tiger conservation?

People and politics – not tigers!