China announced this week that it has removed the giant panda from its list of endangered species, celebrating the status change as a success of China's long-term conservation efforts, including the creation of a giant national park for the iconic animals. "The panda population in the wild has risen to about 1,800, which reflects their improved living conditions and China's efforts in keeping their habitats integrated," Cui Shuhong, head of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment's Department of Nature and Ecology Conservation, said at a news conference.
China said it will still classify the giant panda, considered a national treasure, as vulnerable and protected under conservation laws. That puts China's status for pandas in line with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which switched the animals from endangered to vulnerable in 2016. A panda conservation staff member told China Daily that China solved several major breeding issues since 2000, and "since 2006, we have managed to breed an increasing number of pandas in captivity, and about nine of them survived after being released into the wild."
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Blue Origin conducts 1st test flight of massive rocketSpeed Read The Jeff Bezos-founded space company conducted a mostly successful test flight of its 320-foot-tall New Glenn rocket
-
US won its war on 'murder hornets,' officials saySpeed Read The announcement comes five years after the hornets were first spotted in the US
-
Dark energy data suggest Einstein was rightSpeed Read Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity has been proven correct, according to data collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
-
New DNA tests of Pompeii dead upend popular storiesSpeed Read An analysis of skeletal remains reveals that some Mount Vesuvius victims have been wrongly identified
-
NASA's Europa Clipper blasts off, seeking an oceanSpeed Read The ship is headed toward Jupiter on a yearslong journey
-
Detailed map of fly's brain holds clues to human mindSpeed Read This remarkable fruit fly brain analysis will aid in future human brain research
-
Why the Moon is getting a new time zoneThe Explainer The creation of 'coordinated lunar time' is part of Nasa's mission to establish a long-term presence on Earth's only natural satellite
-
Blind people will listen to next week's total eclipseSpeed Read While they can't see the event, they can hear it with a device that translates the sky's brightness into music
