Asia High Mountains Stories

Our “At the Top of the World” feature introduced a rural herding community in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan as they worked to protect snow leopards and adapt to climate change. Here's where we are now.

Researchers have set up four weather stations in a preserve in the mountains of north Bhutan for the first time, allowing them to monitor conditions at various altitudes over the long-term. Data collected by these stations will help determine the best ways to help wildlife in the region adapt to climate change.

In Kyrgyzstan, community based conservation activities led by Farida Balbakova have paved the way for an integrated, climate-smart landscape management plan to protect the snow leopard.

A snow leopard was successfully collared in Kangchenjunga Conservation Area on May 8, 2017 making it the fourth one to be collared in Nepal’s eastern snow leopard conservation complex.

Phuchung Lachenpa and his team are using local knowledge to set up camera traps throughout their region, laying groundwork for improving snow leopard conservation efforts. 

Delegates from the 12 snow leopard range countries met in Kathmandu to strengthen their commitment to snow leopard conservation and chart a way forward to secure a future for this elusive and endangered cat.

The animals of the Central Tian Shan mountain range find protection from unlikely guardians: the residents of nearby mountain communities. 

In the 19 years Tenzin has been working in conservation, Wangchuck Centennial National Park's first ever population survey of snow leopards has been the most challenging project, but also the most satisfying. 

Snow leopards scale the great, steep slopes of mountains in Central Asia with ease, blending into the landscape. But these endangered cats face many threats including habitat loss, reduced prey and retaliatory killings. WWF works to reduce human-leopard conflict and protect the fragile snow leopard habitat.

Do banning bottled water, taking camera-trap photos of snow leopards, and establishing homestays have anything in common? In the mountains of North Sikkim in India, they do. All these activities are part of a successful ecotourism drive led by young people from the small village of Lachen that has already become an inspiration for similar work elsewhere in the country.

Three years ago, researchers from WWF-Mongolia set up camera traps to photograph snow leopards in and around Khovd Aimag’s Jargalant Khairkhan Mountain, located in western Mongolia’s Altai Mountains, to determine the elusive cat’s population size and distribution.

Just beyond the remote mountain village of Yangma in the high Himalayas of eastern Nepal, Nepali conservationists fitted a female snow leopard with a GPS collar. The collar will allow scientists to track this snow leopard’s movements daily for the next year, which will help us learn more about these mysterious and endangered cats. This female becomes the third snow leopard collared near Yangma since 2013, the first two having both been males.

Over 40 representatives from nine of 12 snow leopard range countries gathered in Kathmandu, Nepal, in April 2016 for a workshop on climate smart conservation planning at the landscape level to protect the iconic snow leopard and its habitat.

Snow leopards, fresh water & climate change

Overlapping heavily with snow leopard habitat, the Third Pole encompasses the snow-covered mountains surrounding the Tibetan Plateau. The Pole’s thousands of glaciers and regular snow melt form the headwaters for 10 of Asia’s biggest rivers, which bring drinking water, power and irrigation directly to 210 million people, while these river basins indirectly support more than 1.3 billion people.

WWF has found a way to protect the snow leopard while also benefiting nomadic herders. As part of the USAID-funded Conservation and Adaptation in Asia’s High Mountain Landscapes and Communities (AHM) project, local herders like Byambatsooj are now being trained and equipped to collect basic data on the remote mountains they know better than anyone else.

Government representatives from the 12 Asian countries where snow leopards roam endorsed an ambitious new plan at the meeting today—a plan to protect and conserve snow leopards and their high mountain range habitat.