Saving the giant panda from extinction isn't just good for the bears _ it's good for the bottom line too, a new analysis by an international team of scientists shows.
The results, published in the journal Current Biology, highlight the economic benefits that they say go hand in hand with environmental conservation.
"Our analyses indicate that further investment in panda protection can be a beneficial strategy for both people and pandas," the study authors wrote.
Giant pandas, known officially as Ailuropoda melanoleuca, are the rarest of the bear species. They make their homes in the mountainous bamboo forests of western China. With their round faces, black-and-white markings and toddling gait, they may also be the most beloved _ long lines are known to form at the panda exhibits in U.S. zoos, which often set up "panda cams" for viewers to check in on the animals from afar.
But pandas fell on hard times in recent decades, thanks largely to human encroachment. In 1980, their habitat covered 40,599 square kilometers; by 1990, it had been cut to just 12,340. This is a major threat to the bears in large part because bamboo, their main food source, is so low in nutrients that each bear must roam a lot of land in order to find and eat enough of it.
In that single decade, their numbers plummeted from 2,459 to just 1,112. In 1984, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the giant panda an endangered species and the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List followed suit in 1990. Their habitat had not just shrunk _ it had become fragmented, making it harder for pandas to move to new areas to find food and seek out mates. This is a particular problem for pandas, who breed infrequently, and which means it's much more difficult for their populations to recover.
In the years since, Chinese officials began making significant efforts to save the panda from extinction, establishing more panda reserves and increasing the reserve area 3 {-fold from 1980 to 2010. Panda numbers gradually began to recover, hitting 1,596 in 2000 and 1,864 in 2010. In 2016, the IUCN Red List reclassified the panda from endangered to vulnerable.
"It is clear that society's investment has started to pay off in terms of panda population recovery," the study authors wrote.
Panda habitat and numbers are still well below their numbers in the 1980s, but even this relative step away from extinction has come with its own critics, the scientists said.
"Some journalists have suggested that it would be best to let the panda go extinct," the study authors wrote.
So for this paper, a team of researchers from China and several other countries sought to calculate the economic value that panda conservation generates, using a framework called the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services.
In order to protect giant pandas, the government must protect their forests, which provide a host of often-underappreciated services to the communities that live in and around them. For example, forests allow for the growing of crops and the grazing of animals, store and clean fresh water, supply firewood and many useful plants. They manage storm runoff, store carbon in the ground and help prevent erosion.
The pandas themselves also hold enormous cultural value that has risen meteorically in recent decades, the study authors pointed out.
"From 1980 to 2010, the cultural values of pandas for Chinese residents and their reserves almost doubled, largely driven by human population increases," they wrote. "Tourism use values grew rapidly, rising 500-fold from 1980 to 2010."
Taking these factors into account, the scientists calculated a median economic value of $632 per hectare per year for the ecosystem services provided by these forests. Extended over the land area in the 67 panda reserves in China, and added to the estimated $709 million from pandas' cultural value, this comes out to a total of roughly $2.6 billion in 2010.
Keep in mind, the costs of preserving panda habitat at current levels come to about $255 million _ meaning that the economic benefits outweigh the costs at a ratio of 10 to one. The scientists said that including the global cultural value would bring the total economic value to $6.9 billion per year, or about 27.1 times the cost of habitat preservation.
They also pointed out that the investment in panda habitat has improved the living conditions of local residents. They pointed to data from the Chinese Statistical Yearbook showing that the annual income in the Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, which sit next to panda reserves, rose by an average of 56 percent from 2000 to 2010, and the farmers in counties within these provinces that were next to the panda reserves saw their annual incomes rise by 64 percent on average.
"Thus, proximity to panda reserves produces an 8 percent better increase in annual farmer incomes relative to the provinces as a whole," they wrote.
The findings could provide a promising example of the payoff of conservation efforts that could be applied to many other threatened and endangered species, the study authors said.
The next step, they added, is to continue to improve the connectivity of fragmented habitat, improve areas that have been degraded and protect them from disturbance from livestock and other threats.
"With a large proportion of panda habitat still remaining outside the Chinese government's protected area system, an expansion of the reserve system would ensure that the panda will not need to be reclassified as Endangered once more," the authors wrote.
