Good news for pandas comes with warning
Print Edition
A LEADING international group may have taken the giant panda off its endangered list, but China’s government said yesterday it did not view the status of the country’s beloved symbol as any less serious.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature now classifies the panda as a “vulnerable” rather than an “endangered” species, due to growing numbers in the wild in southern China. It said the wild panda population rose to 1,864 in 2014 from 1,596 in 2004, the result of work by Chinese agencies to enforce poaching bans and expand forest reserves.
The report warned, however, that although better forest protection has helped increase numbers, climate change is predicted to eliminate more than 35 percent of its natural bamboo habitat in the next 80 years.
In a statement, China’s State Forestry Administration said it disputed the classification change because the pandas’ natural habitat had been splintered by natural and human causes. The animals live in small, isolated groups of as few as 10 that struggle to reproduce and face the risk of disappearing altogether, the administration said.
“If we downgrade their conservation status, or neglect or relax our conservation work, the populations and habitats of giant pandas could still suffer irreversible loss and our achievements would be quickly lost,” it said. “Therefore, we’re not being alarmist by continuing to emphasize the panda species’ endangered status.”
The classification change was announced as part of an update to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, the world’s most comprehensive inventory of plants and animals.
Latest estimates show a population of 1,864 adult giant pandas. Although exact numbers are not available, adding cubs to the projection would mean about 2,060 pandas exist, the IUCN said.
“Evidence from a series of range-wide national surveys indicate that the previous population decline has been arrested, and the population has started to increase,” it said.
The cornerstones of the Chinese government’s efforts to save its national icon have included an intense effort to replant bamboo forests, which provide food and shelter for the animals.
Through its captive breeding program, China has also loaned some to zoos abroad in exchange for cash, and reinvested that money in conservation.
“When push comes to shove, the Chinese have done a really good job with pandas,” said John Robinson, a primatologist and chief conservation officer at the Wildlife Conservation Society.
“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, policy-makers and environmentalists to Honolulu.
According to Simon Stuart, chairman of the IUCN Species Survival Commission, the improvement was “not rocket science” but came from the hard work of controlling poaching and replanting bamboo forests.
“This is something to celebrate because it is not a part of the world where we expect this to happen,” he told reporters.
Experts warned, however, about the effects of climate change on the pandas’ habitat.
With a warming planet predicted to wipe out more than a third of the panda’s bamboo habitat in the next 80 years, the panda population is projected to decline, and any gains realized to date could be reversed, said Carlo Rondinini, mammal assessment coordinator at the Sapienza University of Rome.
“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 said.
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