About the Living Planet Report

What is the Living Planet Report?

The Living Planet Report, WWF’s flagship publication released every two years, is a comprehensive study of trends in global biodiversity and the health of the planet.

The Living Planet Report 2024 is the 15th edition of the report and provides the scientific evidence to back what nature has been demonstrating repeatedly: unsustainable human activity is pushing the planet’s natural systems that support all life on Earth to catastrophic and potentially irreversible tipping points.

Through multiple indicators including the Living Planet Index (LPI), provided by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), it shows a 73% fall in the average sizes of almost 35,000 wildlife populations across 5,495 species between 1970 and 2020.

Though global agreements are in place to put nature on the path to recovery by 2030, there's been little progress on delivery and a lack of urgency. The report calls on world leaders, governments, the private sector and civil society to match ambition with concrete action that meets the scale of the challenge, following through on their commitments to secure a healthy, sustainable, and equitable future for people and the planet.


What is the Living Planet Index?

For two decades, the Living Planet Index (LPI) has provided a measure for changes in biodiversity that has helped inform the global debate on the nature loss crisis.

The LPI used in the 15th edition of the report tracks almost 35,000 population trends across 5,495 species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians around the world.

The thousands of individual population trends are brought together to calculate the average percentage change in population sizes using an index. The percentage doesn’t represent the number of individual animals lost; instead, it reflects the average change in animal population sizes.