Snow leopards, prey, and pastoralists: Understanding the impacts of climate change on human-wildlife coexistence in Central Asia.

Fostering coexistence between people and wildlife requires understanding their interactions and how they might change in the future. Climate change potentially impacts coexistence by exacerbating resource scarcity, shifting land-use patterns or changing human-wildlife encounters. Assessing challenges and opportunities for coexistence under climate change is, therefore, a conservation priority. We focused on the Central Asian highlands to investigate the spatial interactions between the snow leopard, its prey, and pastoralists and to explore how climate change might affect these interactions. Our results reveal regionally diverging patterns, with a potential for increased human-snow leopard conflict in Tajikistan (4-17% higher distributional overlap), yet an increasing spatial separation of wildlife and pastoralists in Kyrgyzstan (11-26% lower overlap). As a result, even under the same climate change scenario, some landscapes will likely require conflict mitigation measures, while others will offer opportunities for restoring wildlife. This highlights the need for context-specificity to foster positive human-wildlife interactions under climate change.