Wildlife populations have fallen 73% since 1970. The data also shows where they are coming back

The world's monitored wildlife populations have shrunk by an average of 73% since 1970, according to the Living Planet Report 2026, published on 8 October by WWF and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).¹ The index behind that figure follows 35,803 population trends covering 5,790 species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians, 967 more populations and 295 more species than the 2024 edition.¹

Greenly charted the full yearly series, which WWF and ZSL publish through Our World in Data.² The global index fell below half its 1970 level in 1998, and has declined by about 2.5% a year on average since 1970, compounded. Its central estimate for 2022 is 0.268: a typical monitored population is about a quarter of its 1970 size.

The estimate comes with real uncertainty. The 95% confidence interval runs from 0.217 to 0.327, meaning the decline is somewhere between 67% and 78%. The headline 73% is the middle of that range, not an exact measurement.

Freshwater is collapsing fastest

Split by ecosystem, freshwater populations fell by an average of 85%, land populations by 69% and marine populations by 59%.¹ Freshwater dropped below half its 1970 level in 1990, eight years before the global index, and has declined at roughly 3.6% a year.

Rivers, lakes and wetlands are under pressure from several directions at once: dams and water extraction change how much water flows, while pollution and drainage degrade what is left. Greenly's interactive story on Iraq's Mesopotamian Marshes shows that pattern on a single landscape, drained to about a tenth of their size by 2002 and then partly reflooded.

The uncertainty is uneven

By region, the steepest average declines were in Latin America and the Caribbean (95%) and Africa (80%), followed by Asia–Pacific (49%), North America (28%) and Europe and Central Asia (23%).¹

The confidence intervals add a layer the headline numbers leave out. Africa's is wide, spanning anything from a 57% to a 91% decline; a wider interval reflects fewer or more variable population records. North America's upper bound is 1.05, slightly above its 1970 level, so at the 95% level the data cannot rule out no overall change there.

Each edition of the index is recalculated from 1970 with new data, so editions should not be compared directly. Asia–Pacific's average decline was reported as 60% in the 2024 edition and 49% in this one; North America's was 39% then and 28% now.⁸ Those differences mostly reflect a bigger, revised dataset, not a sudden recovery.

An average, not a body count

The 73% is easy to misread. It does not mean 73% of the world's animals are gone, and it does not mean 73% of populations are declining. It is an average of how much each tracked population has changed.

Our World in Data's analysis of the 2024 edition shows what that average conceals. Of the 34,836 populations tracked then, 50% were declining, 43% were increasing and 7% were stable.³ For the average to fall by 73% anyway, the declining populations must on the whole have fallen much further than the growing ones have risen.

The recoveries

Alongside the losses, WWF's report highlights species that have recovered. Global wild tiger numbers rose by more than 70% between 2010 and 2025, from about 3,200 to around 5,700.¹

Nepal shows how that happened in one country. It was the first to meet the 2010 pledge to double wild tiger numbers by 2022, and its July 2026 census counted 429 tigers, up from 121 in 2009.^4,5,7 Every national park recorded an increase except Bardiya, which fell from 125 to 112; Chitwan now has 145.⁴ "The reason behind the increasing number of tigers is because we could keep their habitat secure," Hari Bhadra Acharya, an ecologist at Nepal's conservation department, said.⁵

Recovery has costs as well. Government figures show at least 38 people were killed in tiger attacks in Nepal between 2019 and 2023.⁵

Two of those recoveries overlap with Greenly's own reporting. Chitwan is where Himalayan Nature worked with a local community to cut invasive plant cover on 120 hectares of rhino grassland. And in Dubai, the Dubai Turtle Rehabilitation Project has rescued, rehabilitated and released more than 2,350 sea turtles since 2004.

"Positive tipping points"

The report borrows a term usually reserved for climate disasters. A tipping point is a threshold after which change becomes self-reinforcing. WWF argues the same can happen in a good direction, and that it already has in energy: "the falling price of solar, wind and battery power is driving sweeping changes away from fossil fuels," it says, and "having passed the tipping point, the transition to renewable energy looks unstoppable."¹ Food production is the next system it says needs to tip.

What happens next

The Living Planet Index is one of the measures governments can use to judge whether those targets are working. For now, it shows a planet where losses still far outweigh gains, and a handful of species that prove the trend can be reversed where protection is sustained.