The Mountain Gorilla, which is the other subspecies, has only 880 individuals remaining, though its population has slightly increased over the past year.
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Its Red List of Threatened Species will now list the creatures as “vulnerable”, the global organization announced Sunday.
Following decades of conservational work, the Giant Panda has successfully climbed off of the IUCN’s “endangered” animal list…
China’s top forestry authority claimed Monday that the giant panda is still “endangered”, despite an worldwide assessment’s recent decision to downgrade the panda’s conservation status to “vulnerable,” news site thepaper.cn reported. “So few species are actually downlisted, it really is a reflection of the success of conservation”, he said at the IUCN World Conservation Congress, the largest meeting of its kind, which drew more than 9,000 heads of state, policymakers and environmentalists to Honolulu.
The giant panda is no longer an endangered species, following decades of work by conservationists to save it.
China banned trading Panda skins in 1981, and the enactment of the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law banned poaching and conferred the highest protected status to the animal.
In a report published on Monday, they cited the growing number of pandas in the wild in southern China – which jumped from 1,596 in 2004 to 1,864 in 2014.
Meanwhile, partnerships between the Chinese government and worldwide conservation nongovernmental organizations and zoos have spread out research, conservation and breeding efforts.
Through its “rent-a-panda” captive breeding programme, China has also loaned some bears to zoos overseas in exchange for cash, and reinvested that money in conservation efforts.
The population has grown as a result of Chinese government efforts to conserve the species, with effective measures to protect and recreate forests, the IUCN said.
They blame illegal hunting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, along with war, and a severe loss of forest to farmers in West Africa and Indonesia.
“To see the Eastern gorilla one of our closest cousins slide towards extinction is truly distressing”, said Inger Andersen, director general of the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) which compiles the Red List.
The IUCN said its population has dropped more than 70 percent in 20 years.
The Eastern Gorilla has two subspecies which have fared differently.
The reclassification means that four of the world’s six great ape species – eastern gorilla, western gorilla, Bornean orangutan and Sumatran orangutan – are now just one step from being extinct in the wild, while the other two – the chimpanzee and bonobo – are endangered. Visitors to the San Diego Zoo can visit Bai Yun and her 4-year-old son Xiao Liwu in their Panda Canyon exhibit.
The good news ends there, with the great apes now at their most critically endangered in history.
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There are still threats to the animal’s survival, China’s forestry agency added. Kahuzi-Biega National Park DRC. Destruction of forest for timber, charcoal production and agriculture continues to threaten isolated gorilla populations in North Kivu and the Itombwe Massif.
