India’s long-running tiger conservation programme is delivering an unexpected conservation success: sloth bears are also benefiting significantly from the protection and restoration of tiger habitats, according to the country’s first comprehensive national assessment of sloth bear habitat suitability.
Released by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change on the occasion of Global Tiger Day, the report Habitat Suitability Assessment for Sloth Bears Across Tiger Landscapes in India reveals that suitable habitat for sloth bears expanded by 10.7% between 2018 and 2022, while the species’ population increased by 17% during the same period.
The study found that much of this newly suitable habitat lies within India’s tiger reserves, highlighting how investments made to conserve the country’s apex predator are also strengthening ecosystems that support a wide range of wildlife. Sloth bears, regarded as important ecosystem engineers and seed dispersers, are among the biggest beneficiaries of these landscape-level conservation efforts.
According to the assessment, sloth bear habitat within tiger landscapes has grown from 170,094 sq km in 2018-19 to 188,357 sq km in 2022-23. Advanced habitat modelling estimates that India now has around 231,899 sq km of suitable sloth bear habitat. About 28% of this lies within protected areas, with 19.6% (45,441 sq km) located inside tiger reserves. The remaining habitat extends across reserved forests, territorial forests and other forested landscapes outside the protected area network.
Wildlife experts have welcomed the findings as evidence that landscape-based conservation can simultaneously protect multiple species. Former Wildlife Institute of India scientist Dr. Qamar Qureishi noted that the habitat has been expanding at an average annual rate of about 3.3%, while sloth bear abundance has increased by roughly 5% per year, calling the trend encouraging.
However, the report also warns that growing human pressure outside protected areas remains a major threat. Habitat fragmentation and increasing human-sloth bear conflict could undermine these gains unless conservation efforts are extended beyond tiger reserves into surrounding forest landscapes.
The findings reinforce an important conservation lesson: protecting tigers does far more than save a single iconic species. By safeguarding large forest ecosystems, tiger conservation is helping secure the future of numerous other animals, with the sloth bear emerging as one of the clearest examples of this wider ecological dividend.
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