18 May 2013



Ambassador Zhang Junsai and Prime Minister Stephen Harper,

China's loan of endangered giant pandas to Canada highlights the importance of rare species, and the necessity of international cooperation for their protection. Unfortunately, both Canada and China are failing to deal with the problem of climate change. At a time when the world needs to be working aggressively to phase out the use of fossil fuels, both China and Canada are exploiting vast reserves of fossil fuels, adding huge amounts of greenhouse gas pollution to the atmosphere. This behaviour threatens many endangered species including pandas. Canada and China should cooperate to limit the seriousness of this global problem and protect species including pandas.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has highlighted the risks posed by climate change to Earth's biodiversity. In their Fourth Assessment Report (2007), the IPCC concluded that with over 1˚C of global temperature increase, up to 30% of the world's species will be at increased risk of extinction. Above 4˚C of warming, "significant extinctions around the globe" are expected. Current Canadian and Chinese climate change policies are driving us toward even higher levels of warming. Both countries continue to expand the use of coal and unconventional fossil fuels and fail to make adequate investments in low- and zero-carbon forms of energy. Other research published this month concluded that: "without mitigation, large range contractions can be expected even amongst common and widespread species, amounting to a substantial global reduction in biodiversity and ecosystem services by the end of this century". *

Climate change poses a specific danger to pandas. Research published this year in Nature Climate Change concluded that: "An ensemble of bamboo distribution projections associated with multiple climate-change projections and bamboo dispersal scenarios indicates a substantial reduction in the distributional ranges of three dominant bamboo species in the Qinling Mountains, China during the twenty-first century". ** If pandas are to have a bright future, more must be done to constrain fossil fuel use and the climate change it causes. 

In order to protect the Earth's biological richness and the potential of all people in the future to live prosperous and healthy lives, we the undersigned call upon the governments of Canada and China to rapidly implement plans to control greenhouse gas pollution and limit global climate change to under 2˚C, through the stabilization of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide below 350 parts per million.

* Warren, R. et al. "Quantifying the benefit of early climate change mitigation in avoiding biodiversity loss." Nature Climate Change (2013) doi:10.1038/nclimate1887 http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1887.html

** Tuanmu, Mao-Ning et al. "Climate-change impacts on understorey bamboo species and giant pandas in China’s Qinling Mountains." Nature Climate Change 3, 249–253 (2013). http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n3/full/nclimate1727.html

[SIGNATURES]