Excerpt from:
Plastic: There’s No Leopards Like Snow Leopards…
Thus, illegal poaching constitutes one direct threat to the animal. Another threat is the loss of habitat to desperately poor farmers and herders. These people, living on the margin as it is, kill leopards either to reduce leopards using their farm animals as prey or for the income the leopard pelt will bring. Professor Oleg Mitropolsky, a zoologist working in Uzbekistan, says the GEF project has had a profound effect in improving basic services to farm communities. Farmers and herders have also been persuaded that alternative crops and products can produce income for them without encroaching on the snow leopard’s habitat. According to Mitropolsky, other illegal poaching has been discouraged due to activities funded by the project.

Excerpt from:
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Snow leopard project faces finish
Central Asia’s tiny surviving group of snow leopards may soon lose a lifeline that is helping them cling to survival.

A project run jointly by Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and funded by the Global Environment Facility, is scheduled to end in the middle of 2006.

It is successfully enlisting the help of local villagers in protecting the animals, but needs political support.

If the project is not renewed, there are fears the leopards will not be able to withstand the poachers much longer.

There are thought to be only 4,500-7,500 snow leopards in the wild, living in an arc stretching from Mongolia through to Pakistan.