It was announced today that the giant panda is no longer considered an endangered species after its population rose by nearly 17% within a decade.
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In an updates to its Red List of Threatened Species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) changed the status of the giant panda from “endangered” to “vulnerable” after a population increase in China.
Since the 1970s, it has been the focus of one of the most intensive, high-profile campaigns to recover an endangered species, after a census by the Chinese government found around 2,459 pandas in the world – proof of its precarious position, according to the World Wildlife Foundation.
Panda populations have grown as a result of Chinese government efforts to protect their habitat and re-establish forests.
The panda population reached an estimated low of less than 1,000 in the 1980s due to poaching and deforestation until Beijing threw its full weight behind preserving the animal, which has been sent to zoos around the world as a gesture of Chinese diplomatic goodwill. A survey reported 1,864 giant pandas in the wild in China, showing just how effective an integrated approach is in conserving the planet’s diminishing biodiversity.
“However, climate change is predicted to eliminate more than 35 per cent of the Panda’s bamboo habitat in the next 80 years and thus Panda population is projected to decline, reversing the gains made during the last two decades”, the authors noted. One of its two subspecies – Grauer’s gorilla – which was previously listed as “endangered”, has now been put on the “critically endangered” list.
This latest IUCN Red List update also reports the decline of the Plains Zebra due to illegal hunting, and the growing extinction threat to Hawaiian plants posed by invasive species.
“To see the Eastern gorilla – one of our closest cousins – slide towards extinction is truly distressing”, IUCN Director General Inger Andersen said in the statement.
The second subspecies, the mountain gorilla, which is found in the volcanic mountains which border Rwanda, Uganda and DRC and in a nearby area southwestern Uganda, has fared better and its numbers have increased to around 880 individuals.
Four out of six of the Earth’s great apes are now critically endangered – the eastern gorilla, western gorilla, Bornean orangutan and Sumatran orangutan.
Conservation actions have also paid off for the Tibetan Antelope, which has moved from Endangered to Near Threatened.
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The danger of poaching may have declined, but the bears face a larger threat in the form of habitat loss.
