I visited the Sundarbans Forest in Bangaldesh, which is one of the places where you’re most likely to see a Bengal tiger. While I didn’t have any encounters with the very endangered species, almost all of the locals I met had stories. That would be cool, if their stories weren’t so sad. Most frequently, they were about losing loved ones to tiger attacks.
The Sundarbans is a threatened area. As sea level rise eats away at the mangrove forest, the tiger habitat shrinks each year. This puts human communities and the wildlife in the forest in closer proximity, which is bad for both. In addition to disease being more likely to jump from species to species, attacks like these also become more common.
There are so many strategic ways to do reforestation. Restoring spaces that have been natural buffers for human and animal communities is definitely one of them.