Pandas pulled it off. The species everyone wrote off as doomed is officially no longer endangered. Decades of conservation work, habitat protection, and bamboo forest restoration in China finally paid off. Giant pandas have been downgraded from "endangered" to "vulnerable" on the IUCN Red List. Wild populations have climbed past 1,800. A win this big almost never happens in conservation. Most stories go the other way. But the pandas? They rolled onto their backs, stuck their tongues out, and made it look easy.

Twenty giant #pandas# born in 2021 participate in a Spring Festival ceremony at the Shenshuping base of the China Giant Panda Conservation and Research Center in #Sichuan# province on Monday. In 2021, 27 giant pandas were born at the center.

A new pair of giant pandas from China – male Ping Ping and female Fu Shuang – will travel to the United States under a new 10-year conservation cooperation agreement between the China Wildlife Conservation Association and Zoo Atlanta.