In Kyrgyzstan, a climate-ready corridor gives snow leopards and herders room to roam
A stretch of high-altitude terrain in central Kyrgyzstan has been officially designated as the Ak Ilbirs ecological corridor, connecting protected areas to give snow leopards and other wildlife room to move as climate change alters their habitat.
Unlike typical protected areas, the corridor allows herding, forestry and other land uses to continue under a monitoring system that tracks compliance with grazing rules and other requirements.
Designed using climate models projected through 2070, the corridor captures more than 60% of suitable habitat for snow leopards, argali sheep, Asiatic ibex and gray wolves.
To ease pressure on pastures, local NGOs are training herders in alternative livelihoods, such as beekeeping and fruit and vegetable cultivation, while volunteer rangers monitor wildlife and watch for illegal activity.
This article was originally written by Liz Kimbrough appeared on Mongabay, an independent media organization bringing you news and inspiration from nature’s frontline.
Snow leopards haunt the rocky ridgelines of Central Asia, vanishing into terrain so rugged that researchers rarely catch more than a brief glimpse on camera traps. Locals call them “ghosts of the mountains.”
Their elusive nature, paired with the remote landscapes the cats inhabit, make them notoriously difficult to count. An estimated 3,500 to 7,500 snow leopards (Panthera uncia) remain across 12 countries. The IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, lists the species as vulnerable to extinction. Kyrgyzstan, where the snow leopard is a national symbol, is thought to be home to around 300.
Now, a stretch of high-altitude terrain in central Kyrgyzstan has been stitched into an ecological corridor linking several of the country’s protected areas. The Ak Ilbirs corridor covers roughly 800,000 hectares (nearly 2 million acres) of pastureland, forest and other ecosystems across 14 rural municipalities. Ak ilbirs translates to “white leopard” in Kyrgyz.
Set up in 2025, it’s the first corridor in the region designed with the future climate in mind, project officials say. People still live, herd and work inside it, and the rules are built around them as much as around the wildlife.
“Projects like this are good for hope, because you can see changes at the policy level and changes in people’s mindsets on the ground,” Maarten Hofman, associate program management officer at the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), told Mongabay in a video call. “You can see people from many backgrounds coming together and working in one direction.”
The corridor was formalized by the Central Asian Mammals and Climate Adaptation project, or CAMCA, a multiyear initiative led by UNEP that brought together Kyrgyz government agencies, scientists from Humboldt University of Berlin, and two local conservation groups: CAMP Alatoo and the Ilbirs Foundation.
Michele Bowe, a member of the IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas who advised on the project, said it stands out in a region where this kind of approach is still new. “What really sets this corridor apart, and makes it unique in Central Asia, is the close involvement of local communities, facilitated by CAMP Alatoo and the Ilbirs Foundation, in its development.”
A species under pressure
Snow leopards are a sign of a healthy mountain ecosystem. As top predators, they depend on thriving prey populations, mainly wild ungulates like argali sheep and Asiatic ibex, and the habitat that sustains them sustains everything else.
But Central Asia’s high-altitude habitats are facing pressure. Glaciers that feed mountain springs are shrinking. Rainfall is less predictable. Pasture quality is declining, and as it degrades and springs dry up, herders push their livestock higher into the mountains, competing with wild prey for forage. When wild prey runs short, snow leopards turn to hunting domestic animals, leading to retaliatory killings by herders.
“The degradation of high-mountain pastures will inevitably lead to a decline in biodiversity and, ultimately, affect the well-being of snow leopards,” Zharkyn Esenalieva of the Ilbirs Foundation told Mongabay in an email.
Herders are not the enemy of snow leopards, Hofman said, but climate change and overgrazing are increasing the risk of conflict.
Poaching is also a threat. Poachers hunt snow leopards for their pelts, bones and other body parts, which are smuggled for use in traditional Chinese medicine or for decorations. In 2024, Kyrgyzstan raised the fine for killing a snow leopard to 2 million som (roughly $23,000) as a deterrent.
Designing a corridor with climate in mind
To address these threats, scientists at Humboldt University of Berlin mapped where four target species — snow leopards, argali sheep (Ovis ammon), Asiatic ibex (Capra sibirica) and gray wolves (Canis lupus) — currently roam.
They used camera-trap images and wildlife sightings from Kyrgyzstan’s national biodiversity monitoring database, combined with environmental factors like elevation, slope, vegetation cover, and proximity to roads and settlements. They also ran climate models for 2040 and 2070 using data from the CHELSAglobal climate data set, and held workshops with local partners to ground-truth the results.
“We applied a combination of expert local knowledge, climate predictions and technical expertise to build the narratives for the future scenarios,” Julieta Decarre, the project’s lead modeler at Humboldt, told Mongabay in an email.
Under middle and higher carbon emissions scenarios, more than 60% of suitable habitat for these species falls within the corridor, she said. That means the corridor is designed not only to protect wildlife today but to keep working as temperatures, rainfall and weather extremes shift over the coming decades.
Only a year has passed since the corridor was established, and no dedicated studies have yet documented snow leopards moving between the protected areas, but a dedicated corridor monitoring program is underway.
“Observations by shepherds have already indicated that wildlife presence in the corridor areas is higher than outside, and with time, we will hopefully be able to confirm movement through direct wildlife monitoring with camera traps and other methods,” Hofman said.
A new kind of protected area
The Ak Ilbirs corridor carries official protected area status, but it functions differently from most. Many protected areas keep people out; the corridor does not.
“The ecological corridor in Kyrgyzstan is based on a regulatory rather than a restrictive approach,” CAMP Alatoo director Murat Zhumashev and his colleague Salamat Zhumabaeva told Mongabay in an email. “It builds on existing environmental legislation, but unlike strictly protected areas, it does not involve land withdrawal or the introduction of strict prohibitions.”
Instead, decisions about grazing, forestry, tourism, mining and roads inside the corridor must account for the wildlife it was built to protect. Roughly a quarter of pasture areas are set aside as no-grazing zones, and seasonal grazing bans are in place during key periods, including December through January and March through April. Grazing rules require leaving around 40% of vegetation cover as a food base for wild animals. Herders are also asked to keep their dogs under control to avoid disturbing wildlife.
Herding has shaped these landscapes for generations, but today’s grazing pressure can exceed the land’s capacity to absorb it. Seasonal closures and a monitoring program that helps communities track grazing pressure, Bowe said, “will hopefully help to ensure that land management within the corridor is sustainable.”
Rather than banning grazing outright, the corridor is monitored. CAMP Alatoo worked with local governments and herders to develop a system that tracks compliance with grazing rules, using field observations, GPS and data collected directly from pasture users.
In a 2025 test run across more than 78,000 hectares (about 193,000 acres) in eastern Kyrgyzstan, rules were followed in 92.5% of cases, even in areas where herders and livestock owners had limited awareness of the corridor’s requirements.
Protecting livelihoods alongside wildlife
Designing the corridor was the easier part. Convincing the people who graze livestock inside it to cooperate took longer.
At the outset, herding communities responded with caution, Hofman said. Many feared the corridor would function like a strictly protected area, bringing bans on the land they depended on. CAMP Alatoo and local authorities responded with extensive consultations and developed pasture-use plans jointly with herders rather than imposing them from above.
Gradually, the dynamic shifted. “This is partly because communities themselves are already experiencing the impacts of climate change, such as droughts, changing precipitation patterns and declining pasture productivity, which has led to a greater understanding of the need to balance livestock grazing with the sustainability of natural resources,” Zhumashev and Zhumabaeva told Mongabay.
“These communities have been working for thousands of years with livestock, and they are now, because of climate change and other factors, seeing themselves forced to change their ways,” Hofman said. “You need people who are open for these changes. We have seen that people are willing and can do this, can take this risk.”
Some herders appear to be adjusting. Those who graze their animals inside the corridor have reported seeing more wildlife within its boundaries than outside, Decarre said, a sign that coexistence is taking hold.
The shift asks a great deal of communities whose livelihoods have been built around livestock for generations. To ease the transition, the CAMCA project has trained residents in beekeeping, orchard cultivation, greenhouse vegetable growing, and ecotourism.
A survey of more than 150 households found that families involved in conservation had more diversified incomes and depended less on livestock than those sticking with traditional herding. Short-term economic gains were modest, but families reported a broader financial cushion and less pressure to keep expanding their herds.
Patrols and perseverance
The corridor is patrolled by volunteer rangers organized into community-based groups. They install camera traps, monitor pasture conditions, track wildlife movements, and watch for illegal activity.
“Thanks to their strong knowledge of the landscape and close ties to local communities, they help promote and support conservation practices on the ground,” Zhumabaeva said.
The Kyrgyz government has not been able to fund the patrols but has granted rangers the authority to manage the corridor and arrest poachers, according to UNEP. Training and equipment have come through the CAMCA project. Finding steady funding and integrating rangers into government programs are current priorities for CAMCA and its partners.
“People’s mindsets are changing. They’re understanding the importance of protecting their environment,” Baatyrbek Akmatov, one of the rangers who patrols Baiboosun Community Reserve in northern Kyrgyzstan, told UNEP.
The Ilbirs Foundation has proposed extending the corridor northeast toward Kazakhstan and southwest toward Kyrgyzstan’s At-Bashy range, eventually providing continuous habitat from Kazakhstan to China, but says realizing that vision will depend on funding and political will.
For now, the scientific groundwork is in place, and snow leopards are still moving through a landscape where people have agreed to leave them room.
Bowe said the model could carry lessons beyond Kyrgyzstan. She credited the country for changing its legislation to recognize ecological corridors within its protected area system, calling it a recognition that “ecosystems can be conserved without excluding access to natural resources for the people who rely on them for their livelihoods.”
Other Central Asian countries are completing similar legislative reviews, she said. “There is much to be learned from the Ak Ilbirs model. Sometimes strength is found in flexibility and not necessarily in rigidity.”
Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees. View more of her reporting here.
Banner image: A snow leopard (Panthera uncia) caught on camera trap by Ilbirs Foundation.
It sounds promising. I can only hope that any growth in ecotourism will help and not disrupt this process.