Giant Panda
Threats
The Greatest Challenge
While giant pandas once roamed much of Southern China, they are now confined to isolated patches on six mountain ranges. Enlarge Map
Panda conservation activities are at their highest ever, but at the same time the giant panda is facing its greatest challenge: lightning speed economic development. In the past decade, environmental awareness among the Chinese public has increased enormously, and the national government has positioned environmental protection as one of its top priorities. A series of large-scale national environmental programs have been launched, including a national natural forest logging ban and ecological restoration in western China. However, the country’s promotion of its booming economy is often perceived to be at the cost of natural resources, sometimes even outside China’s borders. Sustainable resource use and management is an issue that requires urgent attention. The misuse of natural resources creates the most pressing threats to the giant panda, habitat loss and fragmentation.
Habitat Loss
Bamboo, the panda's primary source of food, only grows at an elevation above sea level of between 550 and 3,400 yards. A pair of breeding pandas needs a minimum of around 7,400 acres to support them.
Logging is one of the threats facing China's nature reserves. Wolong Nature Reserve, Sichuan Province, China
© Soh Koon CHNG / WWF-Canon
Much of the lower elevation land has been claimed for agriculture so remaining habitats are now confined to above 1,500 yards, but this area too is now under pressure from human activities.
Much of the panda's mountainous bamboo habitat has been degraded by timber logging. In the Sichuan Province alone it shrank by 50 percent between 1974 and 1989. The Chinese government banned logging in the panda's habitat in 1998.
Fragmentation
Across the panda's range, the habitat is broken into 20 isolated patches in the Shaanxi, Gansu and Sichuan provinces. Within these patches, a network of nature reserves provides protection for more than half of the panda population. Since pandas cannot migrate between these far-flung habitat blocks, they have less flexibility to find new feeding areas during periodic bamboo die-off episodes.
Bamboo die-off is a natural occurrence in the bamboo life-cycle – happening every 15-120 years - forcing pandas to look elsewhere for their main food source. Without habitat corridors - often through lowland areas between mountain ranges - the pandas may die of starvation.
Small, isolated populations also face a greater risk of inbreeding, which can lead to reduced resistance to disease, less adaptability to environmental changes and reproductive problems. Pandas stand a much greater chance of extinction if their populations remain isolated from each other.
Climate change
Access to bamboo, their main source of food, may become a problem for giant pandas as climate change affects its delicate habitat in China’s Yangtze River basin. Projected impacts to the area could cause more forest pests and diseases, resulting in less bamboo and therefore less food available for the giant panda.
