Fig. 1: The locations and avoided carbon emissions of analysed tiger reserves.
Top left: map of India with the reserves analysed in the study (boundaries from OSM43). Light grey donor reserves are protected areas with tiger presence that did not undergo enhanced conservation policy and were used to generate synthetic counterfactuals for tiger reserves. Dotted bounded boxes represent geographical areas used for donor matching. To ensure robust significance testing, more than 20 donor reserves or placebos were needed per geographical grouping. Therefore, contiguous tiger conservation landscapes54 were combined into the following groups: Shivalik–Gangetic, Central India, Eastern Ghats and Sunderbans regions (A); Western Ghats (B); and Northeast Hills and Brahmaputra region (C). For significance testing, we used a two-sided Fisher’s exact test to compare the ratios of pre-intervention and post-intervention mean squared prediction errors between the treated synthetic reserve and placebo units for each tiger reserve (see Extended Data Fig. 1 for unadjusted P values of tiger reserve with significant effects). Green reserves represent tiger reserves that exhibited significantly avoided deforestation while yellow reserves are treated reserves where the observed deforestation was significantly higher than the synthetic counterfactual (P < 0.05). Dark grey reserves represent tiger reserves that yielded insignificant results (see Supplementary Table 2 for list of P values). Top right: total avoided emissions per reserve. Data are presented as mean avoided emissions ± uncertainty values (based on mean cumulative standard errors reported by ref. 25) in ktCO2e. Error bars were derived by multiplying avoided deforestation, an emissions factor of 3.67 and mean values of the cumulative standard errors in predictions of above- and belowground carbon biomass densities reported by ref. 25 for each reserve. Reserves are numbered and colour coded to indicate locations on maps. Bottom, zoomed-in geographical zones with the number of tiger reserves and donor reserves used for deriving counterfactuals and statistical significance included for each zone. Map boundaries from OpenStreetMap43 under a Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 2.0.
