Living Planet Report 2024:
The Living Planet Report 2024 revealed that the average size of monitored wildlife populations has decreased by 73 per cent since 1970.
Highlights of the Living Planet Report 2024
- The sharpest decline is reported in freshwater ecosystems at 85%, followed by terrestrial ecosystems at 69% and marine ecosystems at 56%.
- Latin America and the Caribbean, where populations have dropped by 95 per cent
- Africa: 76 % decline.
- Asia-Pacific region: 60 % decline.
- Central Asia: 35% decline
- North America: 39 % decline.
- Major threats to wildlife include Habitat loss, overexploitation, climate change, pollution, invasive species, and diseases, which were the dominant drivers of the decline of wildlife.
- Habitat loss was driven by unsustainable agriculture, fragmentation, logging, mining, to name a few causes.
- Ongoing mass coral reef bleaching, affecting over 75 per cent of the world’s reefs, the Amazon rainforest, the collapse of the subpolar gyre and the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are all nearing critical tipping points.
- More than half of the United Nations-mandated Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 are unlikely to meet their targets, with 30 per cent of them either already missed or worse off than their 2015 baseline.
