China's top forestry authority claimed Monday that the giant panda is still "endangered," despite an international assessment's recent decision to downgrade the panda's conservation status to "vulnerable," news site thepaper.cn reported.
"It is premature to downgrade the panda's conservation status," China's State Forestry Administration (SFA) said in a statement sent to thepaper.cn in response to a fresh assessment by International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on Sunday.
The statement also pointed out that pandas in some regions are still facing a survival crisis.
Meanwhile, one third of bamboo forests might vanish within the next 80 years as a result of global climate change, which would significantly influence the existence of panda, the statement added.
"As their status has been downgraded, conservation work could be neglected and relaxed, followed by irreversible damage to panda habitats and to the whole species," said the SFA statement.
IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species assessed ailuropoda melanoleuca, the scientific name of the giant panda, as a rare species in investigations ranging from 1965 to 1988. The giant panda become endangered species in 1990.
A nationwide census in 2014 found 1,864 giant pandas living in the wild in China, an increase of 17 percent over 2004, IUCN quoted SFA's statistics as saying, leading the organization to downgrade the panda's status to vulnerable.
However, the authority emphasized that panda conservation efforts must continue to resolve issues related to the animal's sparse habitats, narrow gene pool and vulnerability to climate change and poor human management, thepaper.com reported.
