Giant Panda Is No Longer Endangered, Experts Say

The improvement of status from “endangered” to “vulnerable” for the giant panda was announced as part of an update to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, the world’s most comprehensive inventory of plants and animals. In the annual report, IUCN said that in 2014, acountrywide panda census discovered 1,864 giant pandas in the wild, greater than 1,596 ten years back.

The other subspecies of the eastern gorilla is the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei), which is already listed as critically endangered.

In a statement to The Associated Press, China’s State Forestry Administration said Monday that it disputed the classification change because pandas’ natural habitats have been splintered by natural and human causes. The non-government organisation said the re-classification proves that conversation does work and that strict laws go a long way to protect endangered animals.

Unfortunately, the new report also brought bad news for the Eastern Gorilla: the world’s largest living primate has experienced a 70% decline in its population over the past two decades because of hunting and civil wars in the region of Africa that it calls home, media reports indicate.

In the 1980s, the population count of the giant panda was as low as 1,000 because of poaching and largescale deforestation.

“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. Since then, the panda has been the focus of a high-profile campaign to save the species.

Wildlife experts released the survey in April, revealing that the number of wild Grauer’s gorillas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo dropped from 16,900 to just 3,800 0ver the last 20 years. When combined together, their population is estimated to be fewer than 5,000.

“Therefore, we’re not being alarmist by continuing to emphasize the panda species’ endangered status”.

“To see the Eastern gorilla – one of our closest cousins – slide towards extinction is truly distressing”, says Inger Andersen, IUCN director general. “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”.

The new listing means that all gorillas -including eastern and western gorillas -are now considered critically endangered. “Conservation action does work and we have increasing evidence of it”.