A huge national park devoted to pandas will soon be created in China's Sichuan province, the country's forestry ministry announced Thursday.
The Bank of China has pledged to finance the park's construction by 2023, The Guardian reports, with estimates that the completed park will be more than twice the size of Yellowstone National Park. There are only about 1,864 pandas in the wild, mostly in the Sichuan mountains, with some in nearby Gansu and Shaanxi provinces. They are threatened by habitat loss, so this is good news for the pandas, who will have free range of the open space, but it's also expected to be a major boost to the local economy.
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