Wakhan National Park — Community-Managed Snow Leopard Conservation in Afghanistan's Pamir Corridor

Wakhan National Park covers roughly one million hectares of the high Pamir and Hindu Kush ranges in Afghanistan's Badakhshan province, forming one of Central Asia's most important snow leopard landscapes. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has worked in the corridor since 2006, and a GEF/UNDP-funded programme (2016–2019, $2.69 million plus $9.04 million in co-financing) supported systematic camera-trap monitoring, community ranger training and anti-poaching enforcement.

Those camera-trap surveys produced Afghanistan's first confirmed photographic records of snow leopards, detecting the species at 16 separate locations across the corridor — concrete, repeatable evidence in a landscape where the national snow leopard population is otherwise estimated at only 100–200 animals. The park is co-managed by local communities and government as an IUCN Category VI protected area, combining ranger patrols, predator-proof livestock corrals, a livestock-insurance scheme to offset losses to snow leopards, and education programmes aimed at reducing retaliatory killing.

The model is a genuine community-governance success on paper, but its evidence base is dated: the GEF-funded phase ended in 2019, and no monitoring data published since Afghanistan's 2021 change of government confirms whether ranger patrols, the livestock-insurance scheme or camera-trap monitoring are still operating. Any replication elsewhere should treat post-2021 continuity as unverified.

Read the full analysis: https://globalsnowleopard.org/gef-undp-projects/afghanistan-conservation-of-snow-leopards-ecosystems/