Add a new threat to the list already facing China’s cute, but highly endangered giant pandas: climate change.
Pandas, who have already seen much of their forest habitats lost to human development, could see a rapid decline in bamboo, their primary food, due to global warming, Sky News Australia reports.
A group of researchers used data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to estimate the impact of climate changes on panda habitats. In the worst-case-scenario, the group calculated that the bamboo in existing panda territories could completely disappear by the end of the century.
The researchers called for environmental planning to devise ways to secure a supply of bamboo to sustain panda populations in the event their predictions come to pass.
Less than 2,000 pandas are known to exist in the wild. Eating up to 38 kilograms of bamboo each day, pandass would be hard pressed to survive if bamboo withers in a warmer climate.