But there is better news elsewhere in the animal kingdom with one of the flagship species of conservation, giant pandas, seeing their status improve from “endangered” to “vulnerable”, a lower category of risk.
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Worldwide groups and the Chinese government have worked to save wild pandas and breed them at enormous cost, attracting criticism that the money could be better spent saving other animals facing extinction.
Thanks mainly to the efforts of China, who claim the Giant Panda as their national animal, the IUCN’s latest estimates appear to show a panda populous of around 2,000 animals. Wild panda numbers have slowly rebounded as China cracked down on the skin trade and gradually expanded its protected forest areas to now cover 1400 square kilometres.
The IUCN Red List now includes 82,954 species of which 23,928 are threatened with extinction.
One of the world’s most popular totems of the need for wildlife conservation may now become a symbol for the movement’s success: the beloved giant panda is officially no longer an endangered species.
Ever since its inception in the 1960’s, pandas have been on the IUCN’s Red List of endangered species ever since its inception in the 1960’s due to habitat loss and poaching threats in their native China. Since then, a combination of forest protection, reforestation, and strict laws against the killing of pandas allowed the panda population to recover.
Meanwhile, climate change is predicted to wipe out more than one third of the panda’s bamboo habitat, a situation that will be exacerbated by insufficient funding and technical support.
IUCN said the eastern gorilla, which lives in mountainous forests of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, has been a victim of the region’s civil wars. And 422 giant pandas were living in captivity at the end of 2015. It is estimated that there are only 5,000 Eastern Gorillas left worldwide.
Hunting has also contributed to a 70% decline in the past 20 years, IUCN said.
“We live in a time of tremendous change and each IUCN Red List update makes us realize just how quickly the global extinction crisis is escalating”.
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Other great apes – the western gorilla, Bornean orangutan and Sumatran orang-utan – now share the status of ‘Critically Endangered, ‘ while chimpanzees and bonobo are listed as ‘Endangered’.
