The pulse of wild life, in one number
Since 1970, the average wild vertebrate population has shrunk by 73%1. Roughly speaking: where ten animals of a given population lived in 1970, fewer than three live today. That’s the headline of the Living Planet Index — the most-cited single measure of how wildlife is faring, built from nearly 35,000 monitored populations across 5,495 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish2.
On the index’s scale, where 1970 = 100, the 2020 reading is 27. The line on this page projects forward from there: if the half-century trend holds, the index reaches about 15 by 2050 — losing nearly half of what’s left. That projection is our own linear extrapolation, not a WWF forecast, and we flag it as low-confidence3.
the average wild vertebrate population is less than a third the size it was in 1970
What the 73% actually means
This is the part that’s most often misread. The LPI does not mean “73% of wild animals are gone.” It means: across the populations tracked, the average population size has fallen by 73%.
The distinction matters. The index is calculated as the geometric mean of relative changes across populations. A population that collapsed from 1,000 to 10 (a 99% loss) and one that grew from 1,000 to 10,000 (a 10× gain) cancel out very differently in a geometric mean than in an arithmetic one. The headline number is sensitive to populations at the extremes — particularly to those that have collapsed most severely4.
Some commentators have argued this makes the 73% figure overstated as a representation of the “average species”5. The counter-argument: extreme population collapses are precisely what biodiversity loss looks like, and an index that smoothed them out would be the misleading one.
Both points are worth holding. The 73% number is the headline; the body of this page is the footnote.
Where the floor fell out
The global average obscures dramatic regional and ecosystem differences1:
By ecosystem: - Freshwater: −85%. The steepest decline of any category. Reservoir construction, pollution, water extraction, and aquatic invasive species are stripping rivers and lakes of fish, amphibians, and aquatic mammals. - Terrestrial: −69%. Driven by deforestation, agricultural expansion, and roads cutting through habitat. - Marine: −56%. Overfishing, bycatch, and the warming and acidification of the oceans.
By region: - Latin America and the Caribbean: −95%. Deforestation in the Amazon, the Cerrado, the Atlantic Forest, and widespread freshwater system degradation. - Africa: −76%. Hunting, habitat conversion, targeted slaughter of large mammals for trade. - Asia–Pacific: −60%. - North America: −39%. - Europe and Central Asia: −35%. The “best” regional figure — but only because Europe had already destroyed most of its large vertebrate populations centuries earlier; there was less left to lose between 1970 and 2020.
The European figure is a useful warning to anyone reading the global decline as a “developing world” problem. It isn’t.
It comes back to land
The report’s central finding on causes is single-pointed: habitat loss and degradation, driven by agriculture and food systems, is the dominant threat in every ecosystem and every region1. Followed by overexploitation (hunting, fishing), invasive species, pollution, disease, and — accelerating in significance — climate change.
The agricultural driver connects this counter directly to the rest of the food story on the site: more livestock, more cropland, more roads to move both, less room for everything else.
The biomass picture is the same story from a different angle: wild mammals are 4% of mammal biomass, livestock dominates the remainder.
If nothing changes
The line heads toward an LPI of ~15 by 2050 — generated by extrapolating the 1970–2020 trend forward. The Living Planet Report itself does not publish a 2050 figure. WWF’s framing is qualitative: “if current trends continue,” “without intervention,” “on the path we’re on.” The numerical extrapolation here translates that qualitative warning into something the counter can display, and we say so plainly.
What would change that trajectory? The Living Planet Report 2024 frames the answer in terms of food system transformation: shifting agricultural land use, reducing food waste, changing diets in high-consumption countries, integrating biodiversity protection into how land is managed for production. Plus the 30×30 global goal (30% of land and ocean protected by 2030, agreed at the UN biodiversity conference in 2022 — current coverage sits at ~17% land and ~8% ocean).
The species-extinction-risk dimension: 47% of large mammals are threatened.
The number leaders cite
The LPI is the single number most often cited when people talk about “the state of nature.” It’s imperfect, well-debated, and updated every two years. We surface it here because the 73% figure is the political fulcrum: it’s what world leaders cite when they describe biodiversity collapse, and it’s what citizens encounter in newspapers and TED talks.
If you only read one wildlife statistic this year, this is probably it. The 2050 projection on the counter is our extrapolation, not WWF’s. The current 27 reading is theirs.