A shared landscape for tigers

The tiger is a flagship species in the Far Eastern Himalaya that plays a pivotal role in the landscape’s ecological balance, and important wildlife corridors straddling India and Myanmar help maintain healthy tiger populations. Transboundary collaboration is necessary to manage such corridors, monitor tigers, and curb illegal cross-border trade in wildlife. Recognizing this, India and Myanmar signed an MoU in February 2020 to cooperate on combating timber trafficking and the conservation of tigers and other wildlife species.

To explore how the two countries can take collective action within the broader framework of the MoU, we conducted a virtual meeting on 9 October 2020 between government and forestry officials and conservation experts from Bhutan, India, Myanmar, and Nepal. Speakers shared regional knowledge and best practices in tiger conservation from the region and stressed strengthening national commitments to conservation, bilateral collaboration on monitoring and knowledge exchange, and a focus on the landscape approach to secure the source population.