Practitioners from six tiger range countries, a team from the World Bank and Global Tiger Initiative met for a workshop in Thimphu earlier this week.
The workshop, Smart Green Infrastructure (SGI) in Tiger Conservation Landscapes: Practitioners Workshop addressed the multispectral implications for planning and implementing of SGI tools with application to roads, hydroelectric projects, ecotourism developments and land use planning that can potentially impact Tiger Conservation Landscape.
In the ecotourism developments, the practitioners discussed that the objectives was to manage tourism in national parks and to develop additional financial flows for protecting biodiversity without raising expectations at community or national level that tourism is the solution.
The practitioners recommended that guidelines to regulate tourism in and around the park should be drafted. They also recommended that capacity-building, institutional coordination and financial resources, from partnerships, public purse, for infrastructure to establish tourism in and around parks should be started.
They said that it was necessary to establish a larger framework for role of nature tourism in conservation.
Keshav Varma, Program Director of Global Tiger Initative, said that Tigers are an iconic indicator of the biodiversity, story of wildlife and ecosystem and that we are losing them on a significant high rate.
He said that these recommendations are applicable to all tiger range countries. There are 3,200 tigers in the world.