China's 1600 wild pandas could suffer further losses thanks to legislation that would allow as much as 15 per cent of their habitat to be sold off for commercial uses.
That's the warning from a team of researchers that has modelled the effects of the Chinese government's "forest tenure reform" legislation, which came into force in 2008 but is only now being introduced in selected provinces.
The reforms will allow the sale of as much as 1.8 million square kilometres of forest, owned collectively by local villagers. This forest accounts for about 15 per cent of the country's remaining panda-inhabited forests
