As of the end of 2015, China had 1,864 giant pandas in the wild, up from about 1,100 in 2000, with 422 in captivity, according to the government.
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A leading worldwide group has taken the giant panda off its endangered list thanks to decades of conservation efforts, but China’s government discounted the move on Monday, saying it did not view the status of the country’s beloved symbol as any less serious.
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. The International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the pandas off the endangered list after a 2014 census found over 1,864 of them in the world, up from 1,596 a decade before. The creation of a panda reserve system in 1992 increased available habitats; today, there are 67 reserves in the country that protect 67% of the population and almost 1.4 million hectares of habitat.
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. Zoo Atlanta announced Saturday that 19-year-old Lun Lun, originally from China’s Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, had given birth to twins.
The cornerstones of the Chinese government’s effort to bring back its fuzzy, black-and-white national icon have included an intense effort to replant bamboo forests, which provide food and shelter for the bears.
But it warned climate change was predicted to wipe out more than a third (35%) of the panda’s bamboo habitat, which could reverse the gains made in the last two decades.
But the WWF, whose logo has been a panda since 1961, celebrated the panda’s re-classification, saying it proved that aggressive investment does pay off “when science, political will and engagement of local communities come together”.
“So few species are actually downlisted, it really is a reflection of the success of conservation”, he said at the IUCN World Conservation Congress, the largest meeting of its kind, which drew more than 9,000 heads of state, policymakers and environmentalists to Honolulu.
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. The chimpanzee and bonobo are considered endangered.
“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.
Only when the wild population could grow steadily without the addition of captive-bred pandas could the species be called less endangered, Zhang said.
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The key threat to Grauer’s gorillas is hunting, even though killing or capture of great apes is illegal. Destruction of forest for timber, charcoal production and agriculture continues to threaten isolated gorilla populations in North Kivu and the Itombwe Massif.
