14/06/2026
The WWF's flagship Living Planet Report, produced in partnership with the Zoological Society of London, uses the Living Planet Index (LPI) to track trends in the average size of monitored vertebrate populations worldwide.
The latest edition reveals a 73% decline between 1970 and 2020, based on nearly 35,000 population trends from over 5,400 species of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles.
This figure represents the geometric mean of relative abundance changes across studied populations, not the total number of individual animals on Earth, nor species extinctions.
Some populations remain stable or are increasing due to conservation successes, while others have collapsed dramatically. Freshwater species have suffered the steepest losses at 85%, with Latin America and the Caribbean experiencing a 95% average drop.
Primary drivers include habitat destruction for agriculture and infrastructure, overexploitation, pollution, invasive species, and climate change. The index serves as an early warning of biodiversity erosion with profound implications for ecosystem services, food security, and planetary stability.
While not a complete census of global wildlife, the consistent downward trend across successive reports underscores the urgent need for transformative action in conservation, sustainable land use, and emissions reduction to bend the curve of nature loss.
