The world's wildlife populations have declined by more than two-thirds since 1970 as forests have been cleared and oceans polluted, according to an assessment released on Thursday.
This "serious drop … tells us that nature is unraveling and the natural world is emptying," said Andrew Terry, director of conservation and policy at the Zoological Society of London .
The World Wildlife Fund report, which used 2018 data from ZSL on the status of 32,000 wildlife populations covering more than 5,000 species, found that population sizes had declined by 69% on average. Deforestation, human exploitation, pollution, and climate change were the biggest drivers of the loss.Wildlife populations in Latin American and the Caribbean were hit especially hard, experiencing a 94% drop in just five decades.
Its findings were broadly similar to those in WWF's last assessment in 2020, with wildlife population sizes continuing to decline at a rate of about 2.5% per year, Terry said. "Nature was in dire straits and it is still in dire straits," said Mark Wright, director of science at WWF-UK. "The war is definitely being lost."However, the report offered some glimmers of hope.
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