A 73% average decline in wildlife populations: an overview of the 2026 Living Planet Index report
What does the Living Planet Index mean?
The 2026 Living Planet Index report is published today. As with previous editions, it makes for a depressing read (despite this year’s title being about the “Science of Hope”).1 The headline is a 73% average decline in wildlife populations since 1970.
While these trends are extremely worrying, the numbers presented in the Living Planet Index (LPI) report are often misunderstood or misreported. In this article, I give a short overview of what these numbers mean — and don’t mean — and what some of the data underneath the headline figure shows.
We’ve written about the LPI several times before, including more technical texts that explain how it should be interpreted. I’ll link to those later, if you want to dig deeper.
The headline figure from the 2026 update of the LPI is that studied wildlife populations declined by an average of 73% from 1970 through 2022. You can see this decline in the chart below.
This covers mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish; it doesn’t yet include invertebrates or plants.
First, let’s clarify what this doesn’t mean. It doesn’t tell us anything about:
- the number of species lost;
- the number of populations or individuals that have been lost;
- the number or percentage of species or populations that are declining;
- the number of extinctions.
The authors of the LPI go to great lengths to explain this. Yet, there is inevitably a long list of headlines claiming that we’ve “lost 73% of wildlife”, “73% of species have gone extinct”, or “73% of species are declining”. All of these are incorrect.
What does this metric actually tell us?
Across the 35,803 wildlife populations studied, the average decline was 73%. As we’ll see later, this doesn’t mean 73% of populations are in decline; in fact, around half of the studied populations were in decline, while half were either increasing or stable.
How the Living Planet Index is calculated
We go into how the LPI is calculated in a dedicated article.
But as a summary, researchers collect data on the change in wildlife numbers across tens of thousands of populations. While the data is measured relative to 1970, very few populations have data stretching back this far. Many populations only have data for much shorter and sparser timelines.
For every population, the change in numbers over time is calculated, giving a rate of change. It can be positive, negative, or zero.
To obtain the final LPI number, researchers take the geometric mean of the rates of change across all these populations. They also provide different weights to different populations, which affects the final result.
What’s changed since the previous reports?
Let’s compare the latest results to the two previous updates.
The 2022 Living Planet Index reported an average decline of 69% since 1970. In 2024, it reported a 73% decline. And this latest report finds the same: 73%.
Across the 35,803 wildlife populations studied, the average decline was 73%.
From this, you might assume that wildlife populations dropped by four percentage points between the 2022 and 2024 editions, and nothing has changed since then.
But that’s not the case. Almost none of this change has happened in the last few years, and the new LPIs should not be seen as simple extensions of the previous ones.
Instead, the entire trend line for the LPI has shifted as the project has gained access to data from more populations and species, and the types of populations included have changed. Since the last report, the number of populations in the LPI increased by around 1,000 (a 3% increase), and the number of species by about 300 (a 5% increase).
In this particular release, the number of populations and species from Africa increased substantially. The number of populations increased by 14%, and the number of species by 38%. This was a deliberate effort to increase data coverage in this region, as it had been so underrepresented in previous reports.
The chart below compares the LPI for 2022, 2024, and 2026 across different regions. You can see that the whole lines have shifted, rather than things changing dramatically in only the last four years.
Around half of the studied populations are decreasing; the rest are increasing or stable
When you hear an average decline of 73%, you’d probably imagine that most of the world’s studied wildlife populations are in decline.
But when we look at how many populations are increasing, stable, or decreasing, this isn’t the case. Almost as many populations are increasing as decreasing.
Across the entire dataset, exactly 50% of populations were in decline, 43% were increasing, and the remaining 7% were stable.2
In the chart, we can see the share of populations in the LPI that have trended in a given direction for different taxonomic groups. What you’ll notice is that around half of wildlife populations have declined in numbers. The rest were either increasing or stable.
When you hear an average decline of 73%, you’d probably imagine that most of the world’s studied wildlife populations are in decline.
So, not all populations are struggling. This is not to dismiss the steep decline many populations are seeing. Instead, it’s useful to know this so we can direct resources more efficiently to the areas and populations that need them most. It’s more effective to target restorative and protective efforts to populations in serious trouble than to assume that all populations are struggling.
If some populations are doing well and others are doing very poorly, we want to know why, so we can understand it and work out how to stop it.
Living Planet Index: What does it really mean?
The Living Planet Index is the biodiversity metric that always claims the headlines. It’s often misinterpreted. How should we understand it?
How does the Living Planet Index vary by region?
The Living Planet Index reports an average decline of 73% across studied animal populations globally. But how does this vary by region?
How the Living Planet project helps us understand changes in the world’s wildlife
Beneath the popular index, the Living Planet database helps us understand where and what animals are deeply threatened, and what animals are thriving.
Endnotes
WWF (2026) Living Planet Report 2026 – The Science of Hope. WWF, Gland, Switzerland.
Marconi V, Deinet S, Freeman R, Puleston H, Halliwell D, McRae L. (2026). A deep dive into the Living Planet Index 2026 – A technical report. ZSL.
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Hannah Ritchie (2026) - “A 73% average decline in wildlife populations: an overview of the 2026 Living Planet Index report” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261008-063543/2026-lpi-update.html' [Online Resource] (archived on October 8, 2026).BibTeX citation
@article{owid-2026-lpi-update,
author = {Hannah Ritchie},
title = {A 73% average decline in wildlife populations: an overview of the 2026 Living Planet Index report},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2026},
note = {https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261008-063543/2026-lpi-update.html}
}
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