Malaysia’s tiger population is rapidly disappearing, and its unlikely champion is the 30-year-old crown prince.
Pahang’s Crown Prince Tengku Hassanal Ibrahim Alam Shah has launched the Save the Malayan Tiger conservation program and established Southeast Asia’s first Royal Tiger Reserve, surrounding part of Taman Negara, the country’s largest national park, with newly protected forests.
In the 1950s, as many as 3,000 Malayan tigers roamed the peninsula in the wild. But now only 150 remain.
Taman Negara has no buffer zone, and its borders are under pressure from logging and deforestation for illegal hunting and agriculture.
In 2023, the Crown Prince established the Al-Sultan Abdullah Royal Tiger Reserve (ASARTR), which is managed by Pahang State Park and local conservation group Engan Management Services (EMS).
ASARTR expanded the national park area by more than 30% and created a 568,500 hectare (1.4 million acre) protected area to restore the tiger population.
“If the forest is connected, the population can naturally increase,” says Adrian Chia Cho Yew, assistant project coordinator at Panthera, an international lynx conservation nonprofit that supports protected areas with advice on lynx conservation.
Tigers can roam freely between national parks and reserves to find prey, establish their territories and avoid conflicts with humans and other tigers, Yu added.
The reserve’s link to Taman Negara, one of Malaysia’s “biggest tiger hubs”, makes it an important part of the national tiger conservation effort, said Chin Wen Yuen, assistant project coordinator at Panthera, who oversees data collection from the reserve’s network of more than 340 camera traps.
“We’re looking at the density of tigers, their location, and of course their prey,” Yuen said. “Tiger reserves are newly gazetted (legally protected) areas, so we don’t know a lot. It’s really important to actually investigate and get this data and know what’s out there and what the baseline is.”
Pantera said the patrols followed a “deep forest anti-poaching strategy,” which led to three poaching incidents in ASARTR and the reserve to be free from traps in 2025.
The approximately 26 rangers are from the indigenous Orang Asli community, and their expertise in tracking and wilderness survival is essential in the dense rainforest.
“They have so much knowledge about the reserve,” Yu said. “We (city people) can navigate on our own, but we don’t know much about the forest.”
The reserve is working to protect tigers through multiple approaches. Malaysian wildlife nonprofit BORA, for example, is focused on increasing tiger prey species such as sambar deer and wild boar, which are struggling in the region due to unsuitable habitat, hunting and, in the case of feral pigs, African swine fever.
The local conservation trust Habitat Foundation oversees community engagement and habitat enrichment through nurseries, as well as the implementation of sustainable tourism projects funded by the Malaysian Ministry of Finance.
Tigers are not the only beneficiaries of these conservation efforts. Home to seven species of wild cats: tiger, leopard, clouded leopard, leopard cat, flattened ocelot, marble cat and Asian golden cat, Panthera describes Taman Negara as a “cat landscape”, which is also home to 150 species of mammals and 380 species of birds.
The reserve has received international support, including grants of 1 million euros ($1.18 million) from the European Union in 2024 and $22 million from the United Arab Emirates’ Mohammed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund in 2025, EMS said.
The reserve is part of a broader effort to reconnect Malaysia’s central forest spine, a 5.3 million hectare (13 million acre) belt of north and south tropical rainforest that has been separated by deforestation. Malaysia has lost nearly one-third of its virgin forests since the 1970s, but as a result of efforts by the government and NGOs, primary forest loss has decreased by 13% in 2024 compared to the previous year. Plans to create 37 ecological corridors in the central forest spine will allow wildlife to move freely again.
“That gene flow is very important to prevent inbreeding,” Yuen says. “It will be very important for long-term tiger conservation.”
So far, there are early signs that the reserve’s conservation efforts are working. Last year, a mother and her two cubs were spotted in a camera trap in the first sign of breeding in the reserve.
“It’s very exciting and quite encouraging,” Yuen said.
