China to build panda conservation park four times the size of London

A huge national park devoted to pandas will soon be created in China's Sichuan province.

The Bank of China has pledged somewhere in the region of 10 billion yuan (£1.08 billion) to the creation of a massive giant panda conservation park in southwestern Sichuan province.

The park “aims to bolster the local economy while providing the endangered animals with an unbroken range in which they can meet and mate with other pandas in the interest of enriching their gene pool”, reports the Associated Press.

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The ministry said the park will measure 2m hectares (5m acres), “making it more than twice the size of Yellowstone national park in the US”, says The Guardian, or around four times the size of London.

Zhang Weichao, a Sichuan official involved in the park planning, told the state-run China Daily that the agreement will help alleviate poverty among the 170,000 people living within the project’s proposed territory.

Plans for the park were initiated in January last year by the ruling Communist Party’s Central Committee and the State Council, the China Daily reported.

Giant pandas are China's unofficial national mascot and live mainly in the Sichuan mountains, with some in neighboring Gansu and Shaanxi provinces. “An estimated 1,864 live in the wild, where they are threatened chiefly by habitat loss. Another 300 live in captivity,” says ABC News.