Snow leopards inhabit high-altitude Central Asian mountain ecosystems that are warming at twice the global average rate, threatening prey availability, habitat suitability, and the species' long-term survival.
Climate change compounds every existing threat to snow leopards: habitat fragmentation, retaliatory killing, poaching for bones and pelts, and prey decline. The welfare consequences for individuals include increased travel distances to find prey, nutritional stress in poor prey years, elevated human conflict risk when livestock are taken, and population isolation that reduces genetic diversity. Conservation interventions must address climate change as a core driver rather than treating it as background context. This means advocating for aggressive emissions reduction, supporting community-based livestock insurance programmes that reduce retaliatory killing, protecting high-altitude refugia, and managing corridors that allow range shifts as climate changes.