About the Living Planet Report

What is the Living Planet Report?

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

The Living Planet Report 2024 is the 15th edition 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 the edge of 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 vertebrate species between 1970 and 2020. 

Global agreements are already in place to put nature on the path to recovery by 2030, but 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 both people and nature.   

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.

To create the Index, the thousands of individual observed population trends are brought together to calculate the average percentage change in population. Therefore, the percentage does not represent the total number of individual animals lost nor if species have gone extinct; instead, it averages out the extent to which each separate population has increased, decreased or remained stable.