14 DAY TRIAL // The World Wildlife Fund recently looked into how global changes in weather patterns affect snow leopards, a species indigenous to northern and central Asia, including part of the Himalaya Mountains.
As their name suggests, these leopards are used to living in areas where average temperatures allow for the land to be covered with snow most of the time, and therefore forests are few and far in between.
However, as we reported on quite a lot of times before, climate change and global warming seem to have a soft spot for messing up vegetation and landscapes worldwide, meaning that various regions are presently losing their forests, while other are growing brand new ones.
This is also the case for the snow leopards' natural habitats.
As WWF explains in its latest study on this issue, new weather conditions in the Himalayas are quite likely to encourage trees to grow in these areas, which means that snow leopards might soon have to either adapt to a whole new hunting ground, or face extinction.
One of the environmentalists working with WWF is doubtful about the snow leopards' ability to adapt, and claims that “We know that snow leopards rarely venture into forested areas, and there's a limit to how high these animals can ascend.”
He goes on to make a case of how “If the treeline shifts upward, as our research predicts it will, we're looking at the snow leopard faced with diminishing options for where it can live.”
What is even more worrying is that, as forests begin to grow in these alpine regions, humans looking to exploit them will also begin to invade these animals' territory.
This can easily lead to unfortunate interactions between representatives of this species and average-Joes looking to make a buck.
Seeing how 30% of said mountainous regions are quite likely to lose their snow in the following years, provided that global temperatures continue to increase at their present-day pace, this already endangered species might just end up being altogether extinct.
Hopefully, conservation projects will be implemented and the snow leopards population worldwide will find itself on the road to survival as soon as possible.