IWN Daily Digest — Friday, 8 May 2026
India confirmed this week what it has been building toward since Prime Minister Modi launched the International Big Cat Alliance in 2023: the first IBCA Summit will be held on 1–2 June 2026 in New Delhi.
Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav announced the dates and unveiled the summit’s logo and website on 7 May, with ambassadors from big cat range countries present at the event. Heads of State and Government from IBCA’s 24 member countries are expected to attend the summit’s inaugural session on 1 June. Technical sessions on both days will bring together more than 400 conservationists, scientists, and policymakers from 95 big cat range countries — nations that together host populations of the seven species the IBCA covers: lion, tiger, leopard, snow leopard, cheetah, jaguar, and puma. Kazakhstan, Namibia, and Thailand currently hold observer status. The summit’s theme is “Save Big Cats, Save Humanity, Save Ecosystem.”
The summit’s headline outcome is expected to be the Delhi Declaration — described by Yadav as the first-ever global declaration on big cat conservation. The declaration is intended to articulate shared conservation priorities, strengthen transboundary cooperation, and promote a landscape-based approach to protecting big cats and their habitats.
What the declaration needs to say
India’s own big cat record is a genuine source of national pride — the world’s highest tiger count, the largest leopard population on earth, and an ongoing cheetah reintroduction programme that has produced a second generation of India-born cubs. Those achievements give India standing to lead this conversation.
They also expose it to harder questions. Forty-three people were killed near tiger reserves or national parks in the first half of 2025. Five tigers died of canine distemper virus at Kanha last month — a preventable disease with a prevention protocol that has existed since 2020. The open grasslands that cheetahs, lions, and snow leopards depend on remain legally classified as wasteland across large parts of the subcontinent. A declaration that speaks only to species counts and protected area expansion will leave the most difficult structural problems unaddressed.
The summit runs 24 days from now. IWN will be watching what the Delhi Declaration actually commits to — and whether the gap between India’s stated conservation ambitions and the lived realities of its forest fringes finds any space in its text.
Sources: PIB — IBCA Summit announcement, 7 May 2026 · International Big Cat Alliance
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