Snow Leopards Face New Threat from Climate Change—People

As traditional pastures dry up, Mongolian herders are forced to move livestock into the big cat’s territory. Now conservationists are stepping in.

Just as the last of the blushing light drained from the sky in western Mongolia, the “ghost of the mountain” struck at the foot of sacred Jargalan mountain where the rocky snow line gives way to a dry and treeless expanse of steppe.

“I saw my animals were very afraid, they were running from something,” said Myagmarjan Maamkhuu in his yurt-like tent, or ger, the day after the incident. “When I got closer, I saw the snow leopard with one of my sheep.”

It was Tenger, a mature female well known to Maakkhuu. “Of course we were angry at first, but we’ve got used to it,” he said, offering me milky tea served in a bowl as his wife and three young sons sat by our side. “We don’t go looking for revenge.”

Maamkhuu tends more than a thousand livestock—sheep and goats mainly and a few horses—and this sheep, he said, with a zen-like lack of angst, was the third one he’d lost that week to snow leopards. In a bad year, the elusive spotted cats take up to 30 of his animals.

But the bucolic haven of that ode is fast becoming a fantasy. More than a third of Mongolia’s 2.6 million people are, like Maamkhuu, nomadic or seminomadic herders, and their pasturelands are disappearing.

Sandwiched between China and Russia, Mongolia is the world’s second largest landlocked country. It’s among the countries most affected by global warming—the focus of the world’s nations in Paris this week—because of its geographic location, fragile ecosystems, and pastoral way of life.

During the past 30 years, the region’s average annual temperature has risen by 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit (2.1 degrees Celsius).

The result: a desertifying landscape with degraded lower-altitude pastures that have traditionally nourished herders’ sheep and goats. It’s so bad that around a quarter of the country has turned into desert, while some 850 lakes and 2,000 rivers have completely dried out over the past 30 years, according to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

ENLARGE

Herders like Myagmarjan Maamkhuu are now grazing their flocks at higher elevations where pastures are richer. But snow leopards are preying on their animals, and some herders are retaliating against the cats.

So Maamkhuu and other herders are taking their animals to better pastures at higher elevations. On those mountainsides, their sheep and goats are eating grasses that sustain wild argali (blue) sheep and ibexes, themselves the main food supply of snow leopards.

Inevitably, the big cats are now preying on the domesticated animals. To protect their livelihoods, herders are hunting snow leopards, whose numbers are now as low as 4,000, with perhaps a quarter of them in the Altai Sayan mountains.

The cats are a barometer of environmental conditions in a swath of territory that spans 12 countries and holds the headwaters of 20 major river basins inhabited by more than two billion people. Rapid warming in this region is disrupting people as well as wildlife.

If climate change isn’t slowed, more than a third of snow leopard territory might become unsuitable for the cats, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which has been helping to conserve them for many years.

To date, WWF says, only 14 percent of snow leopard habitat has been studied with a view to putting conservation measures in place. Ultimately, the goal is to gather enough information to demarcate zones of protection that would be off-limits to herders and their animals.

SOURCE: www.nationalgeographic.com - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/151202-mongolia-climate-change-snow-leopards-livestock-world-wildlife-fund/

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This segment is brought to you through a partnership between the UNDP Climate Change Team at the Ministry of Environment in Lebanon and the NAHARNET team. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any party/institution.

Source: HEREWARD HOLLAND