Malaysia’s tigers are disappearing fast — and their unlikely champion is a 30‑year‑old crown prince.
Tengku Hassanal Ibrahim Alam Shah, the crown prince of Pahang, set up the Save the Malayan Tiger conservation program and established Southeast Asia’s first royal tiger reserve, which envelops part of Taman Negara, the country’s largest national park, in newly protected forest.
In the 1950s, as many as 3,000 Malayan tigers roamed wild across the peninsula. But today, just 150 remain.
Taman Negara has no buffer zone, leaving its boundary exposed to illegal hunting and the pressures of logging and deforestation for agriculture.
In 2023, the crown prince established the Al-Sultan Abdullah Royal Tiger Reserve (ASARTR), which is managed by Pahang State Parks and local conservation organization Enggang Management Services (EMS).
ASARTR increases the national park’s area by more than 30%, creating a 568,500-hectare (1.4 million-acre) protected area for tiger populations to recover.
“If there’s a connectivity of forests, the population can grow naturally,” says Adrian Cheah Chor Eu, an assistant project coordinator at international wildcat conservation nonprofit Panthera, which supports the reserve with advice for big cat conservation.
Tigers can roam freely between the national park and the reserve to find prey, establish their own territory, and avoid conflict with people and other tigers, Eu adds.
The reserve’s connection to Taman Negara, one of “the greatest strongholds for tigers” in Malaysia, makes it a vital part of the nation’s conservation efforts for the species, says Chin Weng Yuen, wildlife analyst at Panthera, who oversees data collection from the reserve’s network of more than 340 camera traps.
“We look at tiger density, where they are, and of course, tiger prey,” says Yuen. “The tiger reserve is a newly gazetted (legally protected) area, so we don’t know a lot. It’s very crucial for us to really go in and get this data to know what’s in there, and what’s the baseline.”
Patrols follow a “deep-forest counter-poaching strategy,” which has led to the disruption of three poaching incidents in ASARTR, and in 2025, the reserve was snare free, says Panthera.
Around 26 rangers are from the Indigenous Orang Asli community, whose expertise in tracking and wilderness survival is essential in the dense rainforest.
“They have so much knowledge of the reserve,” says Eu. “We (city people) can navigate ourselves but we don’t know much about the forest.”
The reserve is tackling tiger conservation through multiple approaches. For example, Malaysian wildlife nonprofit BORA is focused on boosting tiger prey species like sambar deer and boar, which are struggling in the area due to unsuitable habitat, game hunting, and in the case of wild pigs, African swine fever.
Local conservation trust The Habitat Foundation is overseeing community engagement and habitat enrichment through tree nurseries, as well as implementing sustainable tourism projects funded by Malaysia’s Ministry of Finance.
And it’s not just tigers that benefit from these conservation efforts. Home to seven wild cat species — tiger, leopard, clouded leopard, leopard cat, flat-headed cat, marbled cat and the Asiatic golden cat — Panthera describes Taman Negara as a “Catscape,” which also boasts 150 mammal species and 380 types of birds.
The reserve has received international support, including grants of €1 million ($1.18 million) from the European Union in 2024, and $22 million from the United Arab Emirates’ Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund in 2025, according to EMS.
The reserve is part of a broader push to reconnect Malaysia’s Central Forest Spine, a 5.3-million-hectare (13-million-acre) north‑south belt of rainforest which has been fragmented through deforestation. Malaysia has lost nearly a third of its primary forest since the 1970s, but efforts from the government and NGOs resulted in a 13% reduction in primary forest loss in 2024 compared to the previous year. Plans to create 37 ecological corridors in the Central Forest Spine will help wildlife to move freely again.
“That gene flow is really important to prevent inbreeding,” says Yuen. “For long-term tiger conservation, that will be really important.”
For now, there are early signs the reserve’s conservation efforts are working: last year, a mother and her two cubs were spotted on camera traps, the first signs of breeding in the reserve.
“That’s quite exciting and pretty encouraging,” says Yuen.