The wild tiger will finally return to Kazakhstan 70 years after becoming extinct there. On September 8th, 2017, the Republic of Kazakhstan announced plans to bring the iconic cats back to their historical range in the Ili-Balkhash region and signed a memorandum with WWF to implement a joint tiger reintroduction plan.

Kazakhstan will be the first country in Central Asia to implement such a paramount and large-scale program. In the last 100 years, global wild tiger populations have declined by 96%, from 100,000 to as few as 3,890 in 2016. Wild tigers had completely disappeared from Central Asia by the 1960s due to habitat loss and uncontrolled hunting and poaching.