Global wildlife populations are declining rapidly, according to the by the conservation group WWF. It reveals that global populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish have fallen an average of 68 per cent globally since 1970, declining at a rate .
“Let’s be clear: this is catastrophic,” says Mark Wright at WWF in the UK. “Despite ongoing verbal and written commitments by governments around the world and by businesses around the world to seriously address the climate crisis… we are clearly failing,” he says.
The report draws on data from the Living Planet Index, produced by the Zoological Society of London. The index tracked global biodiversity between 1970 and 2016, based on the monitoring of 20,811 populations of 4392 vertebrate species.
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The largest drops identified in the report are in South America, Central America and the Caribbean, where the average size of monitored wildlife populations has declined by 94 per cent. It also highlights that three-quarters of ice-free land on Earth has been significantly changed by human activity and more than 85 per cent of the area of wetlands has been lost globally.
Nearly one-in-three freshwater species around the world are now threatened with , and the 3741 freshwater populations monitored showed an average decline of 84 per cent since 1970.
In the UK, grey partridge populations declined by 85 per cent between 1970 and 2004, probably due to agricultural intensification.
But some animal populations have increased through conservation efforts: in the six years to 2014, the tiger population of Nepal rose by 64 per cent, while loggerhead turtles increased by 154 per cent in a protected area off the coast of South Africa between 1973 and 2009.
“Things are not written in stone and we can turn them around if we choose to,” says Wright.
“There is no shortage of these sorts of reports and they continue to be a wake-up for business, for government and for citizens as well,” says David Symons, UK sustainability director at consulting firm WSP.
But some efforts still aren’t moving the needle enough, he says, including a UK plan to protect biodiversity that was enacted in 2018. “Less than half of the [UK] 25 Year Environment Plan indicators are showing improvement, so there is a huge job of work to be done [there] to reverse biodiversity loss,” says Symons.
will require targeted efforts to minimise habitat loss as a result of food production, including restoration of degraded land and a greater shift to plant-based diets, says Wright.
Pandemics are intricately linked to agricultural expansion into pristine wilderness areas, he notes, as contact between livestock and wild animals may lead to the transmission of disease into new species.
In upcoming UK environment, agriculture and trade bills, the WWF is advocating for a legal requirement to track environmental impact and for companies to prove that their supply chains haven’t caused deforestation.
“We do not want the UK to be party to any activities, or import any products, that result in any environmental destruction,” says Wright.
The government’s Environmental Land Management scheme is a step in the right direction, says Symons. “[It] will provide us with an opportunity to use public money for public good – rewarding farmers for tree and hedge planting, rewarding farmers for better river management,” he says.
“We should have been addressing this decades or more ago,” says Wright. “There’s also room for hope… based in the realisation that we need to act strongly and ambitiously now.”
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