In brief
Wildlife populations down 73% — and finance still funds nature destruction 33 to 1
The WWF's 2026 Living Planet Report puts the average decline in monitored vertebrate populations at 73% between 1970 and 2022 — broadly unchanged from the 72.9% reported in 2024, and recalculated on 967 additional populations and 295 new species.
The 2024 edition was subtitled A System in Peril; this year's is The Science of Hope. WWF has moved from diagnosis to a theory of change, built on "positive tipping points" — thresholds beyond which change becomes self-reinforcing.
By that measure, energy has already tipped: solar is the cheapest source of new electricity generation in most countries and capacity doubles every three years. Food and finance have not; both remain in the "enabling" phase and must tip this decade if the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework's 2030 targets are to stay in reach.
Three systems drive the loss: fossil-fuel energy, food production (the leading cause of habitat destruction and roughly 30% of greenhouse gas emissions), and finance. In 2023, US$7.3 trillion flowed into nature-negative activities against US$220 billion for nature-positive ones — about 33 dollars for every one. Harmful agricultural subsidies alone amount to US$470 billion a year. Nature underpins some US$58 trillion of output, or about half of global GDP.
Not everything is declining. Roughly half of monitored populations are stable or increasing. Tigers rose from around 3,200 in 2010 to some 5,700 in 2025; Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna have recovered; and the green sea turtle was downlisted from Endangered to Least Concern in 2025. As the report puts it: "Where people have done the work, wildlife has come back."
The report's ask is for policy to align with the goal: repurpose harmful subsidies, mandate nature-risk disclosure, and close a biodiversity finance gap it puts at US$1.3 trillion a year.
