In Ayubia National Park of north-eastern Pakistan, human-leopard interactions have historically led to the tragic loss of human lives – with a disproportionately high impact on women. Women are the primary collectors of fuelwood and fodder, and the main livestock grazers in mountain ecosystems. Despite facing the highest risk of leopard encounters during peak leopard activity hours, traditional awareness-raising programs have predominantly targeted men. Cultural and social boundaries often prevented male researchers and social activists from directly engaging, communicating, and educating women in these rural mountain communities, creating a critical gap in mitigating human-leopard conflicts. 

To address this critical disconnect, the Wildlife Ecology Lab at the University of Haripur, in collaboration with our PeLeWG and with funding provided by the Global Leopard Conference, has successfully completed the innovative project "Empowing the guardians: involvement of women in leopard conservation in Pakistan”. This groundbreaking initiative has applied a science-backed, community-oriented approach structured into three vital pillars:

• Scientific Research and Temporal Monitoring: studying local leopard spatial distribution, movement patterns, and activity periods to precisely map temporal overlaps between human activities and leopard presence
• Targeted Female Education and Behavior Literacy: directly engaging local women with tailored ecological knowledge and teaching them about leopard behavior, peak activity hours, and practical safety protocols during fieldwork
• Capacity Building and Empowerment: strengthening local capacity by training local women alongside wildlife staff to foster sustainable community-led stewardship

By aligning rigorous scientific ecological data with direct community engagement where it matters most, this initiative closes a long-standing conservation gap, empowering local women to protect both their community and endangered leopards in Pakistan.

Our group has recently received, and happily accepted, an invitation to become an official Partner for the planning and organization of the 2nd Global Leopard Conference during 10-13 May, 2027. This online conference provides a global and affordable forum for the world’s scientists, practitioners, conservationists, and local people fond of leopards and doing their best to make these magnificent big cats survive, recover, and flourish. The inaugural conference in 2023 was a huge success that brought together over 300 delegates from 59 countries and featured more than 100 presentations. We are not going to stop here and become complacent, but aim to move forward and make the conference an even more visible and influential platform for leopard research, conservation, and management.

Please follow the Global Leopard Conference website for news and updates. We are looking forward to seeing more presentations and topics from more people and more countries across the leopard range.

Our group has celebrated International Leopard Day, 3 May 2026, by giving a short presentation "Perspectives from Persian leopard conservation" in the webinar "Leopards in a changing world: securing coexistence and ecological balance" organized by the International Big Cat Alliance (IBCA). It described the Red List and the Green List status of the Persian leopard, main threats, Range-wide Strategy for the Conservation of the Persian Leopard, conservation on the ground, and top priorities under political instability.  

Our group and some of its members (M. Farhadinia, M. Gritsina, S. Karryeva, M. Pestov, A. Potayeva, T. Rosen and V. Terentiev, and I. Khorozyan, online) participated in the Third Range State Meeting of the CMS Central Asian Mammals Initiative (CAMI) during 24-26 June 2025 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The PeLeWG is part of the CMS/CAMI team and its Programme of Work, as it was established to boost the implementation of the Range-wide Strategy for the Conservation of the Persian Leopard, which was developed under the auspice of CMS/CAMI. The group participants actively participated in discussions related to the current (2021-2026) and future (2026-2032) Programme of Work, species status in spatial units particularly those where Persian leopards exist, and other topics of the agenda. A number of comprehensive and thought-provoking presentations were made by T. Rosen on meeting topics and their current status, and by M. Farhadinia on the activities of the PeLeWG and their progress. This meeting has laid a firm ground to further build our group’s capacities and develop visionary workplans and funding schemes so that to realize the Range-wide Strategy more comprehensively and effectively.