The giant panda has been taken off the endangered species list after decades of conservation efforts.
Advertisement
China’s giant panda survey a year ago found that the species’ numbers had risen 17 percent in the past decade, with 1,864 adults living in the wild. The species – which is hunted for their soft and warm wool – saw its population decline from around 1 million in the 1980s to about 100,000 to 150,000 today.
The IUCN credits the Chinese government for its forest protection and reforestation efforts to protect the panda bear.
“The concern now is that although the population has slowly increased, and it is still very small, several models predict a reduction of the extent of bamboo forests in China in the coming decades due to climate change”, he told reporters.
Meanwhile, climate change is predicted to wipe out more than one third of the panda’s bamboo habitat, a situation that will only be exacerbated by insufficient funding and technical support.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said the panda should no longer be classified as “endangered”, but “vulnerable” instead.
Marco Lambertini, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Director General, said: “For over fifty years, the giant panda has been the globe’s most beloved conservation icon as well as the symbol of WWF”.
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. Its population is now estimated to be fewer than 5,000.
Four of the six great apes, including the Eastern Gorilla, the largest living primate and one of our closest cousins, are now Critically Endangered and just one step away from extinction due to illegal hunting, according to a new report. The challenges we still face to save this and other species, including our own, are still not insurmountable.
IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species assessed ailuropoda melanoleuca, the scientific name of the giant panda, as a rare species in investigations ranging from 1965 to 1988.
Grauer’s Gorilla, one of the Eastern Gorilla subspecies, has experienced a fall in population from 16,900 individuals in 1994 to an estimated 3,800 past year.
Advertisement
The IUCN Red List includes 82,954 species, both plants and animals.
