New hope for giant pandas

THE population of endangered giant pandas in the wild in China has jumped by more than 40% to 1,590 since efforts to protect them began in the early 1990s, the Chinese government said yesterday.

However, pandas still face threats from “human intervention” and the isolation of their living areas, a government report said.

The giant panda, which lives in China’s mountains, is one of the world’s rarest animals.

Its survival is threatened by cutting of forests where it lives and by hunting its black and white pelt.

A 1988 survey found 1,110 pandas in the wild, the report said.

A survey this year found 1,590 animals, according to the report.

That didn’t include pandas under 18 months of age, suggesting the total number could be higher.

Since conservation efforts began in the 1990s, the panda’s “environment has improved and the number of its population has steadily increased”, the report stated.

However, in some areas, it said, problems from “isolation and human intervention still exist”.

“We can say with full confidence that we have achieved great success in the conservation of the giant panda,” said Zhuo Rongsheng, head of the government’s wildlife protection office. “However, we cannot say that the giant panda is no longer endangered.”

The panda has been under state protection since 1962.

Zhuo wouldn’t say how many had to be found before China would deem them out of danger of extinction.

“They are very vulnerable. Even if the population doubles, we still have to work relentlessly,” he said.

“The results are heartening, but we have to be very careful about how we interpret them,” said Karen Baragona, head of the panda conservation programme at the global environment network World Wildlife Fund, which paid for half of the €1 million survey.

“There are hundreds more pandas in the wild than we previously knew, but we really don’t believe the population could have increased so rapidly, given the habitat loss from logging,” she said.

The study, China’s third since the 1970s, covered Sichuan province in the southwest and Shaanxi and Gansu in the north.

It tracked pandas through their droppings and mapped their distribution and population density.

Two-thirds of pandas were found in nature reserves, which have almost quadrupled to about 50 in the past decade, Baragona said.