Save a tiger, save an ecosystem: Why protecting the big cats is a biodiversity boon
Release Date: 03/17/2026
‘Big Cats’ highlights the remarkable power of photojournalism
Mongabay Newscast
Jeff Sikich, the biologist for the National Park Service in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, thought that Steve Winter “was crazy” for wanting to capture a photograph of a mountain lion in front of the Hollywood sign. “He looked at me like I was crazy because he said, ‘There are no mountain lions in Griffith Park.’ But I knew in the past that there had been,” Winter says. It took him 15 months, but Winter managed to do it. He captured the famous mountain lion, named P-22 by scientists, sauntering down a hill at night wearing his tracking collar, with the Hollywood sign shimmering in the...
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A health crisis for Peru’s recently contacted people brings planetary health to the fore
Mongabay Newscast
Mongabay staff writer Aimee Gabay joins the Newscast this week to discuss her reporting trip to the Peruvian Amazon, where she with the Indigenous Matsés community. She made the trip initially to examine environmental threats to Matsés territory. Instead, she found them suffering from an epidemic of malaria and hepatitis B, which they have been asking the Peruvian government to help address. “The story itself was a surprise … every question directed to them about environmental changes would immediately become an issue about health,” Gabay says. The current epidemic of malaria and...
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Christiana Figueres and Garik Israelian on Jane Goodall’s legacy and the search for truth
Mongabay Newscast
A new award has been created in honor of late conservation icon Jane Goodall by the board of the , an international gathering of scientists and artists to be held from Oct. 17-22 in Tenerife, Spain. Christiana Figueres has been selected as the recipient of this inaugural . Figueres is the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and is known for her work in securing the negotiations leading to the Paris climate agreement. She joins the podcast this week to discuss the significance of this medal and her thoughts on the future of science...
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In Bhutan, the pursuit of happiness extends to the food system
Mongabay Newscast
Bhutan is a Himalayan kingdom sandwiched between China and India. Forty percent of its 800,000 citizens work in the agriculture sector. The mountainous country is famous for its breathtaking landscapes and its unique policy of “Gross National Happiness,” instituted in 1972 by Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the fourth king of Bhutan. My guests on the Newscast this week say this philosophy is the backbone of the nation's food system, and its plan for full food self-sufficiency by 2029. “Our food system isn't just about producing food. It's about sustaining our landscapes, our communities, and our...
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‘Remembering Wildlife’ before it goes extinct
Mongabay Newscast
British wildlife photographer Margot Raggett says she created the book after she heard David Attenborough say, “The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?" Her effort was to provoke this question in others and to give the proceeds from its sale to conservation organizations. In a sense, the book went viral and generated a following, prompting Raggett to continue the book series and her nonprofit, . “Sometimes people get upset with me and say ‘They're still around,’ but I want people to stop and...
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Historic fire seasons are the ‘new normal’ without ‘serious action’ on climate change
Mongabay Newscast
Elizabeth Goldman is a co-director of , previously known as Global Forest Watch, a database measuring forest loss that’s frequently cited in Mongabay reporting. She joins this week’s podcast to detail GNW’s updated 25-year of global forest fire trends. The picture is stark: Forest fires burn twice as much forest today as they did 20 years ago, and historic fire seasons are the “new normal,” she says. “Catastrophic, large-scale fires are becoming more of a normal. The last three years are the worst three years in the record-keeping in our data set,” Goldman says. “Fires now...
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The ‘quiet revolution’ inspired by Delhi’s urban wildlife
Mongabay Newscast
In her upcoming book, , conservation biologist Neha Sinha takes readers to the hidden and not-so-hidden ecosystems of India’s largest city. And while the book expertly details the biodiversity, I believe its greatest strength lies in connecting with the reader emotionally through powerful stories from her personal life. On this week’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, Sinha explains why nature in cities isn’t just important from an ecosystem health perspective, but necessary for the emotional life of all people. Sinha describes the difficulty of caring for her ailing father, and how this...
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Why are forests in Liberia disappearing?
Mongabay Newscast
On this week’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with features writer Ashoka Mukpo, who traveled to southeastern Liberia to investigate what satellite images indicated was a spike in deforestation over a relatively concentrated period. Along with video production coordinator Juan Maza, Mukpo illegal cacao plantations in the rainforests in the county of Grand Gedeh. In this interview, he explains how and these plantations are appearing now in Liberia. “What we saw … probably the best metaphor for it is that there's a kind of gold rush happening in this part of Liberia, except...
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Oil has brought destruction to the Niger Delta; women and human rights may save it
Mongabay Newscast
On this week’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, I speak with travel writer . She has documented the violence and natural destruction that the presence of oil companies have brought to the people of the Niger Delta in her latest book, . Saro-Wiwa is also the daughter of the late activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed by the Nigerian government in 1995. Her father led a peaceful resistance against the oil companies' presence in the Niger Delta by mobilizing 300,000 people from Ogoniland in 1993. It is fair to say his activism started the movement against the destruction and exploitation led...
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The Mediterranean Sea’s beauty hides an ecosystem under pressure
Mongabay Newscast
The Mediterranean Sea accounts for less than 1% of the world’s ocean surface water, but it contains roughly 18% of global marine biodiversity. It is home to 150 million people along its coastline (roughly equivalent to Russia's population). And it sequesters 17.2 million metric tons of CO2 each year. Joining the Newscast this week to talk about the unique biodiversity of the Mediterranean Sea and its threats is journalist Manuela Callari. Callari has written for Mongabay, highlighting the to purple sea urchins (Paracentrotus lividus) along the Italian coast. These marine invertebrates are...
info_outlineTiger populations have risen in some countries, such as Bhutan, Nepal and India, but the global population of the big cat species remains critically endangered, says Debbie Banks, campaign lead for tigers and wildlife crime at the Environmental Investigation Agency. The global tiger population was recorded at roughly 5,574 in 2022, with the species having disappeared from roughly 95% of its historical range.
Banks joins Mongabay’s podcast this week to detail the status of Panthera tigris, the successes and failures of the first Global Tiger Recovery Program (GTRP), what the second iteration (2.0) seeks to do differently, and what she thinks range countries need to focus on.
“This story is very much a mixed bag of localized successes and elsewhere just stagnation … and a lack of political and financial investment to bring tigers back from the brink in some places.”
Making good on the commitments of GTRP 2.0, Banks says, would also benefit nations seeking to fulfill their environmental protection commitments under the Global Biodiversity Framework agreed upon by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). That’s because tigers are what’s known as an umbrella species, meaning that protecting them also protects ecosystems and a host of other species and biodiversity contained within these ecosystems.
“Tigers are an apex predator, therefore a keystone species, an umbrella species, a flagship species. And by saving tigers…we save so much more.”
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Image Credit: A tiger in Sumatra. The Sumatran subspecies is critically endangered due to habitat loss and hunting, and now faces additional threats from two hydropower dams planned to be constructed within their habitat. Image courtesy of Pete Morris.
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Timecodes
(00:00) Introduction
(03:07) The global status of the tiger
(10:33) Threats to the tiger
(24:16) Law enforcement and reducing tiger demand
(33:35) The Global Tiger Recovery Program
(42:02) Protecting tigers ‘saves so much more’