China

Importance of saving the flagship species

By Zhu Chunquan (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-13 17:34

BEIJING - The giant panda is not only the flagship species for endangered wildlife among conservation communities, but a wildly adored animal among the public. This is one of the reasons why pandas are so important to us.

By saving pandas, we are also helping preserve the rich biodiversity - plants, the land, other species - all of which are important for pandas to survive.

There are fewer than 1,600 individuals of giant pandas in the wild along a few mountain ranges of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces in China, and more seriously, they are fragmented into more than 18 smaller populations separated from one to another. Nearly 80 percent of the subpopulations consist of only several to dozens of individuals. A few of them are now facing extinction due to a loss in habitat, fragmentation and degradation.

Although great progress has been made over the past 50 years, there's much to be done in terms of panda protection in the long run. Based on four nature reserves in the 1960s, a core network of protected areas for giant pandas have been established in central China. It consists of 62 nature reserves and a couple of forest farms, migration corridors, and sustainably managed forests. However, half of the giant pandas' habitats and one-third of their population in the wild haven't been included in the network.

More urgently, due to factors such as local socio-economic development and climate change, a series of new challenges have begun to surface, threatening the giant pandas in the wild. For instance, large infrastructure projects including roads, hydropower facilities, dams, mining, and mass tourism sites pose new threats to the panda's survival. Sometimes, local policy adjustments and economic development programs fall short of providing enough protection for pandas. Effects of climate change may also have the potential to impact the habitat of giant pandas.

The author is the conservation director of biodiversity at WWF China.

For China Daily