There is going to be a national park in China just for pandas, double the size of Yellowstone

Nuan Nuan the panda.
(Image credit: Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images)

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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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.