The tiger is an endangered species. Poaching for fur and body parts and destruction of habitat have simultaneously greatly reduced tiger populations in the wild. At the start of the 20th century, it is estimated there were over 100,000 tigers in the wild, but the population has declined outside of captivity to 3,200. Major reasons for population decline include habitat destruction, habitat fragmentation, and poaching. Demand for tiger parts for use in traditional Chinese medicine has also been cited as a major threat to tiger populations. The global wild tiger population was estimated by the World Wide Fund for Nature at 3,200 in 2011.
India is home to the world's largest population of wild tigers but only 11% of the original Indian tiger habitat remains, and it has become fragmented and degraded. From 1973, India's Project Tiger, started by Indira Gandhi, established over 25 tiger reserves in the reclaimed land, where human development was forbidden. The project was credited with tripling the number of wild Bengal tigers from some 1,200 in 1973 to over 3,500 in the 1990s, but a 2007 census showed that numbers had dropped back to about 1,400 tigers because of poaching. Following the report, the Indian government pledged $153 million to the initiative, set up measures to combat poaching, promised funds to relocate up to 200,000 villagers in order to reduce human-tiger interactions, and set up eight new tiger reserves.
The Wildlife Conservation Society and Panthera Corporation formed the collaboration Tigers Forever, with field sites including the world's largest tiger reserve, the 21,756 km2 (8,400 sq mi) Hukaung Valley in Myanmar. Other reserves were in the Western Ghats, in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, the Russian Far East, and China, covering in total about 260,000 km2 (100,000 sq mi).
In the 1940s, the Siberian tiger was on the brink of extinction with only about 40 animals remaining in the wild in Russia. As a result, anti-poaching controls were put in place by the Soviet Union and networks of protected zones were instituted, leading to a rise in the population to several hundred. Poaching again became a problem in the 1990s, when the economy of Russia collapsed. The major obstacle in preserving the species is the enormous territory individual tigers require (up to 450 km2 needed by a single female and more for a single male).
Current conservation efforts are led by local governments and NGO's in concert with international organizations, such as the World Wide Fund and the Wildlife Conservation Society. In 1993, China had banned the trade in tiger parts, and this diminished the use of tiger bones in traditional Chinese medicine. After this, the Tibetan people's trade in tiger skins became a relatively more important threat to tigers. The pelts were used in clothing, tiger-skin chuba being worn by singers and participants in horse racing festivals, and had become status symbols.
In 2004, international conservation organizations launched successful environmental propaganda campaigns in China against the Tibetan tiger skin trade. There was outrage in India, where many Tibetans live, and the 14th Dalai Lama was persuaded to take up the issue. Since then there has been a change of attitude, with some Tibetans publicly burning their chubas.
In 1994, the Indonesian Sumatran Tiger Conservation Strategy addressed the potential crisis that tigers faced in Sumatra. The Sumatran Tiger Project (STP) was initiated in June 1995 in and around the Way Kambas National Park in order to ensure the long-term viability of wild Sumatran tigers and to accumulate data on tiger life-history characteristics vital for the management of wild populations.