The Panda’s rebound has led the IUCN to remove the creature from its list of endangered species and upgrade it to “vulnerable”, and while they are now making a recovery, they still face the loss of up to one-third of their bamboo habitat due to climate change, conservationists warn. The group’s Red List of Threatened Species tracks the global conservation status of the world’s species.
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The change in status is largely credited to intensive conservation efforts by China, where the Giant Panda is native.
“For over 50 years, the giant panda has been the globe’s most beloved conservation icon as well as the symbol of WWF”.
The IUCN report warned that although better forest protection has helped increase panda numbers, climate change is predicted to eliminate more than 35 percent of its natural bamboo habitat in the next 80 years, potentially leading to another decline.
Plains zebras have also declined by nearly a quarter in the last 14 years as a result of illegal hunting and are now “near threatened” on the latest Red List update. Conservation action does work and we have increasing evidence of it.
“This illegal hunting has been facilitated by a proliferation of firearms resulting from widespread insecurity in the region”, said the IUCN in a report on the animal.
In the 1980s, the population count of the giant panda was as low as 1,000 because of poaching and largescale deforestation.
Meanwhile, the Eastern Gorilla lands into the endangered list. The WCS also noted that there are few Grauer’s Gorillas in captivity so if it were to become extinct in the wild it would be near impossible to save.
There are no exact figures for the numbers of cubs, but estimates bring the total number of giant pandas to 2,060. This fall is largely due to habitat loss caused by violence in Rwanda and illegal hunting for bushmeat.
Sadly it also revealed that the eastern gorilla is now endangered, meaning four of the six great ape species are now listed internationally as “critically endangered”.
The official status of the much-loved animal has been changed from “endangered” to “vulnerable” because of a population rebound in China.
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Grauer’s Gorilla (G b graueri), one subspecies of Eastern Gorilla – has lost 77 per cent of its population since 1994, declining from 16,900 individuals to just 3,800 in 2015.
