Wildlife Populations Have Plunged Globally, But Some Buck the Trend

A new report paints a dark picture of the state of global wildlife—but also highlights flickers of light where some populations are on the upswing. 

Over the past half-century, populations of thousands of vertebrate species across the globe have decreased in size by 73 percent on average, according to the “Living Planet” report published Wednesday by the nonprofits World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. A number of factors contributed to this precipitous decline, including habitat loss, overexploitation and climate change. 

However, a closer look at certain regions and biomes offers reasons for hope, the report’s authors say. Roughly half the populations they studied are stable or even increasing. Though these gains are outweighed by the greater magnitude of losses elsewhere, they show that concerted conservation efforts have made a difference for species such as green sea turtles and bluefin tuna, according to lead author Rebecca Shaw, the chief scientist at the World Wildlife Fund.

“The report focuses on hope because even though the headline statistic is really, really stark … what we see underlying the statistic is some real movement in some species,” Shaw said. 

Despite these successes, the report stressed the importance of tackling biodiversity loss at a global scale by changing the three major systems driving extinction: food, energy and finance.  

Species Losses By the Numbers 

The “Living Planet” reports are released roughly every two years. The latest taps into data from tens of thousands of populations of 5,790 vertebrate species across the animal kingdom—from Laysan albatross to ring-tailed lemurs. 

Rather than tallying the total number of animals lost or gained, the researchers measured changes in relative abundance of populations. That means a small population of monkeys that has dropped from 200 to 100 would have experienced the same 50 percent loss as a large colony of 20,000 bats that has dipped to 10,000. 

This method allows researchers to compare data from different populations and better track overall trends, said Louise McRae, a research fellow at the Zoological Society of London who works on the Living Planet Index that informs the report.

“The reason we do that is so that we can get a good picture of what is happening across different species by giving them equal weight within this index,” she said. “We’re getting a better signal of the health of the environment.”

So while the new report does not mean there are 73 percent fewer wild vertebrate animals in total today than in 1970, it does show populations the report monitored are plummeting on average. However, diving deeper into the numbers reveals the varied stories playing out for wildlife around the world. 

By geography, monitored species populations have faced the most significant decline in Latin America and the Caribbean, with an average 95 percent decrease from 1970 to 2022. In that same timeframe, North America and the combined regions of Europe and Central Asia have seen around 25 percent declines, though the authors pointed out that development in those areas had already had large-scale impacts on nature prior to 1970. Declines in Africa and the Asia and the Pacific region were 80 percent and 49 percent, respectively. 

The researchers also broke the numbers down by biome. Freshwater species were the clear losers, seeing an overall decline of 85 percent—significantly more than terrestrial or marine species, though these vertebrates are also seeing major losses. 

The report attributed the nosedive in freshwater species to a number of factors, including pollution, overharvesting and habitat loss caused by infrastructure such as hydropower dams. Impacted species included in the report range from migratory fish such as Chinook salmon in the Western United States to the Amazon pink river dolphin in Brazil, which plummeted by 65 percent between 1994 and 2016 alone in the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in the state of Amazonas. 

For terrestrial species, habitat loss and degradation drove much of the biodiversity decline, while marine life faced major threats from overfishing. 

Viorel Popescu, an associate research scientist at Columbia University who wasn’t involved in the report, said it’s valuable to bring these “huge amounts of data” that are largely invisible to most of the public “to the forefront.” But he added that the report may be an underestimate of total biodiversity losses, given that it only focuses on vertebrate species the authors analyzed. Other scientists have echoed this critique. 

Popescu pointed to the collapse of many populations of insects, which make up roughly three-quarters of all known animal species on Earth. In fact, beetles alone account for 25 percent of all animal species. 

“Those declines could be even more drastic,” Popescu said. 

Good News and Bad News

The report also pointed to bright spots around the world. For example, in 2025, the green sea turtle became the first marine turtle to be downlisted by the nonprofit International Union for Conservation of Nature, which means populations increased enough around the world for the animal to no longer be considered endangered. 

But this recovery didn’t happen overnight. According to the report, a roughly five-decade coordinated conservation effort launched across more than 80 countries helped populations rebuild through protecting nesting females and eggs, beach management, lighting regulations, turtle excluder devices and other bycatch reduction measures to help reduce sea turtle entanglements in fishing gear. 

Researchers have also documented population increases for species such as tigers, Southern African elephants and Atlantic and bluefin tuna following conservation initiatives and stricter industry regulations. 

However, efforts to help pull species from the brink are struggling to secure the necessary funding to meet the accelerating global extinction crisis, experts say. In the United States, the Trump administration has made deep cuts to conservation programs, both domestically and internationally.

“[D]evelopment aid budgets from national governments and international agencies have historically formed the majority of global conservation funding, with a focus on supporting the communities living alongside wildlife,” Andrew Terry, the chief conservation officer at the Zoological Society of London, said in an emailed statement to Inside Climate News. “Cuts to these aid budgets by governments across the northern hemisphere have had widespread impacts on people and nature alike.” 

Even if additional funding emerges, the new report argues that ensuring the long-term future of the world’s biodiversity requires fundamental shifts to society, particularly in the food, energy and finance sectors. Agriculture is the single largest cause of habitat loss and a major contributor of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions alongside fossil fuels. 

According to the report, accelerating solar uptake around the world illustrates how systems can change to reduce their impact on biodiversity. However, financial systems are still pumping money into development that hurts biodiversity, with one estimate suggesting that $7.3 trillion flowed into activities that harm nature in 2023, more than 30 times the money spent on efforts to protect or restore it. 

Shaw said the new report shows countries must simultaneously increase conservation funding to restore wildlife populations, while reducing investments in the activities that undermine them. 

“Go after the root causes, don’t do this species by species,” she said. “Focus on the food system, the energy system and the finance system, and the connections between the three. That’s a recipe for really turning around the loss of wildlife and the loss of species that we’re seeing at a global scale.”