Darwin Initiative

Collaborative conflict management for community livelihoods & snow leopard conservation

Darwin-logoThrough a 3-year grant by the DEFRA’s Darwin Initiative, the Snow Leopard Trust is partnering with the University of Aberdeen to further develop and grow programs and strategies to manage conflicts between human livelihoods and biodiversity conservation, and contribute to protecting the endangered snow leopard. This grant also provides us with the unique opportunity to test the impact of multiple interventions on livelihood, attitudes, behavior and species abundance across Mongolia, Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Managing conflicts

Through the Darwin grant, we’ll be able to extend our reach and partner with 16,000 people in 2000 households in 47 communities in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia; the Hindu Kush-Pamir, of Pakistan, and the Tien Shan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan, to:

  1. Reduce livestock losses through improved corrals. We provide designs and materials not available locally, communities provide labour.
  2. Offset economic losses via insurance programs. Households pay premiums into a community-managed fund for livestock they want to insure; elected committees investigate livestock kills and pay out claims.
  3. Improve livelihoods via conservation-linked handicrafts. Building on women’s wool/felting skills and traditional artistry, we train them to meet international market standards. We set mutually-agreed base prices, guarantee to purchase bulk orders and provide access to US markets.

In return, participants and community leaders sign “Conservation Contracts”, agreeing to ban the killing of snow leopards and wild ungulates. Of our current 40 partner communities, 33 are engaged in one of these programs, 7 in two.

Herding communities in snow leopard habitat typically live on less than $2 a day, and losing livestock can be devastating to them.
Herding communities in snow leopard habitat typically live on less than $2 a day, and losing livestock can be devastating to them.
Testing effectiveness

As part of this project, we’re testing both the effectiveness of our individual conservation programs, and the effectiveness of combined program approaches.

We expect combined initiatives to be more effective than standalone ones because they provide multiple benefits and involve more people, including women, who we know are more negative towards predators than men.

In order to compare results, we’ll also monitor three additional control communities (one in each country) with no interventions over three years. We will evaluate success in multiple ways within (participants v non-participants) and between communities, by comparing household income, attitudes towards conservation programs/predators/ungulates (disaggregated by gender), and the killing of predators and wild ungulates (between communities only):

  1. No intervention v single programs  (year 1)
  2. Before and after combined program implementation (year 1 v year 3)
  3. No intervention (controls) v single programs v multiple programs (year 3)
A snow leopard mother and her cubs in Mongolia’s Noyon Mountains
A snow leopard mother and her cubs in Mongolia’s Noyon Mountains
Training the implementers

In each country, we have developed a training toolkit and trained field implementers in community engagement and negotiation skills. In each community, field implementers are holding meetings with community members and councils to encourage uptake of combined programs, and identify and engage community champions to support initiatives.

Expected Outcome

We expect conservation interventions to improve the attitudes of participating households and communities towards wild ungulates and predators, leading to a reduction in the main threats, and a cessation in illegal killing. This will ultimately lead to increased abundance of these species.

Although these species respond quickly to improved survival and we expect to see improved abundance around our participating communities, the full benefits of our interventions may only be witnessed by our long-term monitoring beyond 2018.

Partners
Stories

“Your Snow Leopards are Killing our Goats”

Changing Lives, One Corral at a Time

Turning the Tide: Mongolian Conservationists Create a Future for Snow Leopards

Snow Leopard Enterprises Makes Raw Wool Valuable

How to effectively engage local communities for conservation? Become PARTNERS

Local Communities: The Key to Saving Snow Leopards

 

This project made possible by a grant aided by the Darwin Initiative through UK government funding.