Wild animal population sizes decreased by an average of 69 percent between 1970 and 2018. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reports this on Thursday in the biennial Living Planet Report. For example, the population of the eastern lowland gorilla in Congo decreased by 80 percent between 1994 and 2019. According to the nature organization, the decline in biodiversity and climate change are the main causes of the decline.
Other major causes include loss of wildlife habitat, overfishing and pollution. Obstacles such as weirs and dams in rivers also play a role. Animals in Latin America and the Caribbean, in particular, have had a hard time over the past fifty years, according to WWF: on average, the population there decreased by 94 percent. The freshwater fish population has declined by 83 percent worldwide.
WWF’s report looked at the population size of 5,230 wildlife species in 2017 and 2018. These include mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish. The nature organization calls on policymakers to tackle the loss of biodiversity and climate change as soon as possible, because that would also benefit wildlife. It is the fourteenth time that WWF has presented the report. In 2020, the population was found to have declined by 68 percent between 1970 and 2016.