Bringing the Tiger Back from the Brink: The Six Percent Solution

This influential analysis argued that wild tigers persist at meaningful densities across only a small fraction of their range, with the great majority of remaining animals concentrated in a limited set of source sites. The authors proposed an emergency strategy: prioritize protection and intensive monitoring at the roughly six percent of tiger habitat that holds breeding source populations, rather than spreading thin resources across vast low-density landscapes. They stressed law enforcement, prey recovery, and rigorous population tracking at these sites as the most cost-effective path to preventing extinction. The framework reshaped global tiger funding toward source-site protection and remains a touchstone for debates about whether landscape-scale or site-based approaches best secure big cats. It matters because it reframed tiger recovery as an achievable, measurable triage problem.