ON Semiconductor Cares About Giant Panda Conservation Efforts in China
For more than 10 years, ON Semiconductor adopts a panda each year at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Foundation, www.pandahome.org/en/, in Sichuan, China. The Sichuan Province is famous for its panda population which is a protective species in China. Currently, the Sichuan government is taking necessary efforts to preserve the panda population in hopes to prevent its extinction. Chengdu Panda Research Center is the biggest research center in China to maintain and preserve the population of Panda. ON Semiconductor sponsors one female panda, now named “Miss ON Semi,” each year in partnership with its manufacturing site in Leshan, China’s giving initiatives while supporting the Foundation’s conservation, breeding and research of endangered and rare species, like the giant panda.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Pandas play a crucial role in the bamboo forests where they roam by spreading seeds and facilitating growth of vegetation. With only around 2,060 pandas living in the wild, the giant panda is considered vulnerable of extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Due to the fact that pandas reproduce so infrequently, it is very difficult for their population to recover from such a low point. One the main reasons that panda populations have declined is habitat destruction. As the human population in China continues to grow, pandas’ habitat gets taken over by development, pushing them into smaller and less livable areas. Habitat destruction also leads to food shortages.
Pandas feed on several varieties of bamboo that bloom at different times of the year. If one type of bamboo is destroyed by development, it can leave the pandas with nothing to eat during the time it normally blooms, increasing the risk of starvation. Again, to combat this issue, the Chinese government has actively worked to restore and protect bamboo habitat, and these measures have shown positive results. State Forestry Administration surveys have concluded that the panda population has increased since the Chinese government’s actions, and in 2016, the IUCN upgraded the giant panda’s status from Endangered to Vulnerable. While an increasing panda population is good news for now, it is predicted that climate change will eliminate over 35% of the panda’s bamboo habitat in the next 80 years.
To learn more about ON Semiconductor’s commitment to community impact, please read our 2018 Corporate Social Responsibility Report.
