China launched a pioneering "panda festival" yesterday, an ambitious attempt to stop farmers encroaching further into giant pandas' scarce natural habitat by helping them rake in the tourist dollars instead.
But environmental experts warned that however good the intentions, increased visits or numbers might end up damaging one of the rare creature's few remaining living spaces.
The "First China (Sichuan) International Panda Festival" is being held at the Wolong Nature Reserve in the southwestern province of Sichuan and is the first panda-related tourist drive organised at such a habitat.
The centre is the world's largest giant panda sanctuary, with about 60 pandas in captivity and others living in the wild, in the bamboo-rich forests.
Mr Jim Harkness, chief representative in China for the World Wildlife Fund, an international conservation organisation which has provided support to the Wolong reserve, warned that the scheme carried risks.
"The main challenge with tourism is how well you manage it," he said.
"Bringing tourism into panda habitats in large numbers could potentially be a problem if it stimulates demand for more forest products and leads to more disturbance of wild pandas."
In China, tourism has often been operated just as a revenue-generating project for the local government, and money earned from tourism is not always pumped back into conservation, according to environmentalists.
In recent years, the number of tourists visiting the 500,000-acre (200,000-hectare) reserve has steadily increased, reaching 70,000 last year, according to Mr Luo Anming, the reserves spokesman.
But the figures are still too low to be a stable source of income for the more than 4,000 people who have lived in the reserve for generations, he said.