CHINA: WWF commends China provinces for panda conservation efforts
- 00:00:27
- ITN Source
CHINA: WWF commends China provinces for panda conservation efforts
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on Wednesday (October 25) recognized the efforts of China's Sichuan and Gansu Province to preserve the giant panda habitat with an award. WWF's Director General James Leape gave the global conservation organization's highest accolade for significant conservation achievements to the Sichuan and Gansu governments. Now more than 700 giant pandas are under the conservation scheme, which is almost half the total surviving pandas in the wild in China. China's west Sichuan and Gansu Province are putting joint efforts together to establish a connected, new protection area. The 1.6 million hectares of new protected area will allow the panda population of the two provinces to mingle, helping ensure the survival. Shared by the provincial governments of Sichuan and Gansu, the Minshan landscape is known to be one of the most biologically diverse temperate forest landscapes on earth. "The real challenge for panda reservation has been that the panda population has been badly fragmented. It's scattered across 20 different places. So the key to this challenge... the key challenge here has been to reconnect those panda populations, so you have one large healthy population. And that's what are doing in actions they are taking today," Leape said. "This connected area will boost the biodiversity protection in Minshan, the new protection area." The two provincial governments are due to establish a further 900,000 hectares of protected areas for other wildlife by 2010. The giant panda is found only in China. Today an estimated 1,600 wild pandas live in nature reserves in Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces.
ITN Source | October 27, 2006
