The last Caspian tiger disappeared from Kazakhstan in the late 1940s — hunted to extinction, its riverside forest habitat stripped away. For over 70 years, the country's wetlands and river deltas fell silent of the world's largest cat. Now, a carefully coordinated effort is working to change that.
In 2025, the Kazakhstan Tiger Reintroduction Programme — led by the country's government with support from WWF Central Asia in Almaty and the United Nations Development Programme — planted 37,000 seedlings and cuttings across nearly 10 hectares of the South Balkhash region in southeast Kazakhstan, where tigers once lived. The species planted — narrow-leaf oleaster, willow, and turanga — are the building blocks of tugai forests, the dense riverine woodland that tigers need to survive. Earlier plantings, stretching back to 2021, have already reached heights of up to 2.5 metres.
The habitat work is running in parallel with the tigers themselves. Two captive Amur tigers — a male and a female — arrived in Kazakhstan from the Netherlands in 2024 and appear to have adapted well. Wild tigers from Russia are expected to arrive in the first half of 2026. Scientists consider Amur tigers a suitable stand-in for the extinct Caspian subspecies, as genetic studies suggest the two were likely the same population until human activity forced them apart.
Full wild release remains years away — conservationists estimate the habitat will need at least 15 more years to mature. But the forest is already growing.