WWF report: monitored African wildlife populations down 80% since 1970

Centre · 1WWF's Living Planet Report 2026 found that monitored wildlife populations across Africa fell by an average of 80 percent between 1970 and 2022. 1 Mixed · 2Africa's decline was the second largest of any region, after Latin America and the Caribbean (95 percent); the Asia-Pacific region fell 49 percent and the global average was 73 percent. 1 2 Mixed · 2The figures come from the Living Planet Index, compiled by the Zoological Society of London, which tracks changes in the size of monitored populations rather than counting the total number of animals lost. 1 2

Centre · 1Yann Laurans of WWF France said the decline is continuing, and that Africa's steep fall partly reflects the very high biodiversity still present when monitoring began in the 1970s, whereas much of Europe had already lost considerable biodiversity by then. 1 Centre · 1WWF singled out the Congo Basin as under intense pressure from agricultural expansion, logging, mining, roads and infrastructure, as well as hunting and poaching; African forest elephant populations have fallen by more than 60 percent in recent decades, mainly from ivory poaching and habitat loss. 1 Centre · 1The report names climate change, habitat destruction, overexploitation, pollution, invasive species and disease as main threats, calls for a shift from fossil fuels, and identifies the global food and agricultural system as the biggest single driver of biodiversity loss. 1

Centre · 1WWF stressed that the loss is not irreversible: about half of monitored populations globally are stable or increasing, and it pointed to recoveries among tigers, some western lowland gorillas, green sea turtles, bluefin tuna and some southern African elephant populations. 1 Centre · 1Citing UN Environment Programme estimates, RFI reported that about $7.3 trillion was spent in 2023 on activities harmful to nature against $220 billion on protecting or restoring it, with an annual biodiversity funding shortfall of $942 billion; Durrel Halleson of WWF Africa called the findings "a stark warning, but also a call to action". 1 Centre · 1The report comes ahead of the Cop17 UN biodiversity conference in Armenia on 19-30 October. 1

Left · 1Ecologist Hannah Sarah Wauchope of the University of Edinburgh argued that the index's data are far from complete, drawn from ad hoc academic studies, patchy monitoring programmes and management data for harvested species, and that the monitored populations may not be representative of wildlife as a whole. 2 Left · 1She noted critiques that, taken at face value, roughly as many populations are increasing as decreasing, and said the index is biased towards protected areas and undisturbed habitat, which could mean it underestimates the decline; but it might also over-represent threatened or harvested species, and the biases are not fully understood. 2 Left · 1The index gives greater weight to under-sampled regions such as Africa and South America, which Wauchope called a coarse way to balance bias, and it includes some populations with data at only two time points, adding uncertainty. 2