Published on October 23, 2024
Today is World Snow Leopard Day, a celebration of one of the planet’s most iconic and mysterious animals. Beloved around the world, these rare cats roam the high mountains of Asia - but they face increasing threats from habitat loss, retaliatory killings and climate change.
On the Tibetan plateau, traditional livestock herders have coexisted with snow leopards for centuries. For the most part, it has been an uneasy and sometimes painful coexistence, as these predators occasionally attack and kill valuable livestock to feed themselves. Most Tibetan herders are devout Buddhists, and many of them hold a deep conviction that all living beings are interconnected – which means that they rarely retaliate against snow leopards or other wild carnivores in case of conflicts. Nonetheless, even their tolerance has limits, and in some rare cases herders do resort to killing predators to protect their livestock.
However, if you travel across China’s Three-River-Source National Park, high up on the Tibetan Plateau in the country’s Qinghai province, you might be surprised to find that many local herders are not only fond of snow leopards, but actively engaged in their conservation.
Their engagement is part of an ongoing conservation programme, launched in 2022 by Cartier for Nature, China Green Foundation, the Academy of Forestry Inventory and Planning of China’s National Forestry and Grassland Administration, and the Three-River-Source National Park. Through this programme, local authorities help herders living in the National Park to coexist with snow leopards and other predators by introducing measures to reduce human-wildlife conflict. In parallel, around 400 local herders have been trained to install and maintain camera traps. They are an essential tool to study the population of an elusive species like the snow leopard. Researchers feed the hundreds of thousands of images and videos from the network of cameras into an AI-powered software, which helps them identify and analyse what species are present and how they are doing. For many of the participating herders, this research work has deepened their ties to the nature around them.
The Three-River-Source National Park, or Sanjiangyuan in Mandarin, is China’s oldest and largest national park. It is widely regarded as one of the world’s key habitats for the rare, threatened snow leopard, sheltering an estimated population of around 1,000 of these big cats – which may be as much as 20% of the global population. It is also the source region of three of Asia’s major rivers, sustaining the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.
Over time, this long-term conservation programme is expected to contribute to a healthier, resilient ecosystem that can sustain people, livestock and wild animals in a changing climate; with clean and reliable water for people in the region and downstream. The wildlife monitoring system set up over the last two years will allow experts to identify trends and measure the impact of their work. Initial signs are encouraging. The camera traps installed over the last two years have already captured over 2000 snow leopard images and hundreds of videos, and some local herders report more frequent sightings.