The new national park for the unmistakable bears with black and white fur will cover more than 27,000 square kilometres, as the state newspaper "China Daily" reported on Thursday. It would be three times the size of the famous Yellowstone National Park in the USA. 

According to "China Daily", the project has a budget of 1.3 billion euros over the next five years. A corresponding agreement between the State Bank of China and the Sichuan Provincial Government was signed on Tuesday.

The giant panda is an endangered species and occurs in the wild only in China. 80 percent of the approximately 1800 animals live in Sichuan, the rest in the provinces of Shaanxi and Gansu. Breeding successes in captivity are extremely rare. The new national park should enable the pandas to reproduce undisturbed.

Around 50 panda bears live in zoos outside China. Six of them in European zoos. The Berlin Zoo pays an annual rental fee of 900,000 euros for the Panda couple Meng Meng and Jiao Qing, who arrived in June 2017.

is/ch (afp, rbb)