Changing Climates, Changing Behaviors: A Behavioral Lens on the Snow Leopard (Panthera uncia)

Climate change is rapidly reshaping high‐altitude mountain ecosystems, with far-reaching consequences for the endangered snow leopard (Panthera uncia). Rising temperatures, altered snow cover, and shifting precipitation patterns are contracting cryospheric habitats and restructuring prey distributions, forcing snow leopards to modify how and where they move, hunt, and interact with other species and people. This narrative review synthesises peer-reviewed studies, conservation reports, and climate assessments (2000–2024) from across the Hindu Kush–Himalaya and adjacent ranges to examine climate-linked changes in snow leopard behavioural ecology. We summarise evidence for habitat contraction and upslope shifts, altered movement and home range, changes in predation and scavenging behaviour, enhanced human–snow leopard interactions, and emerging interspecific competition with other large carnivores. We then explore the implications of these behavioural responses for conservation planning, highlighting how climate-driven changes in activity patterns, space use, and conflict risk challenge static protected area models and conventional conflict-mitigation approaches. On this basis, we outline key elements of a behaviour-informed conservation agenda, including dynamic protected areas, climate-smart corridors and livelihoods, systematic integration of behavioural monitoring, and community-based governance embedded in international initiatives such as GSLEP. We argue that snow leopard behaviour offers a sensitive indicator of climate-induced ecological stress and should be central to adaptive, climate-aware management of vulnerable high-mountain ecosystems.