One of the world’s most iconic endangered species is no longer on the endangered species list! In the annual report, IUCN said that in 2014, acountrywide panda census discovered 1,864 giant pandas in the wild, greater than 1,596 ten years back.
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Over the past decade numbers have risen by almost 17 per cent in the wild and there are now around 2,000 outside of captivity. The improved status does show that the government’s effort to help conserve the panda have been effective.
“For over fifty years, the giant panda has been the globe’s most beloved conservation icon as well as the symbol of WWF”, said the general director of the WWF, Marco Lambertini.
A surge in illegal hunting is threatening the eastern gorilla, the world’s largest primate, an global conservation group has said.
Highlighting the plight of the great apes, the organisation says the Eastern Gorilla has moved from “Endangered” to “Critically Endangered” due to a “devastating population decline of more than 70 percent in 20 years”, primarily due to illegal hunting. The first assessment of the giant panda made by the IUCN in 1965 described the species as “very rare but believed to be stable or increasing”.
Thanks to an increase in available habitat, its population rose 17% from 2004 to 2014, leading the IUCN to downgrade it from endangered to vulnerable.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has now re-classified the bear as being “vulnerable”.
The WWF has worked for decades to save giant pandas by developing reserves and working with local communities to establish sustainable livelihoods and minimize their impact on forests, the organization said.
The IUCN Red List includes 82,954 species – including both plants and animals. There are fewer than 1,900 giant pandas in the wild.
The news, however, is not so upbeat for the Eastern gorilla.
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According to the IUCN, numbers have dropped about 70 percent in the last two decades, and with ongoing political instability in the areas the eastern gorilla calls home, it’s going to be hard to reverse the fall. Nearly 23,928 of the listed are may be extinct in the coming years if proper conservation will not be carried out.
