World’s Wildlife Sees Accelerating “Precipitous Declines”

Nature is unravelling’: Global wildlife populations have sunk 69% since 1970, new report warns

Charlotte Elton, 13 October 2022 (Euro News via Yahoo News)

“The world's wildlife populations have plunged by more than two thirds in just 50 years…[and humanity is ‘losing the war’ to save nature, warns the biennial World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Living Planet 2022 report….[Data on the status of 32,000 wildlife populations accounting for more than 5,000 species] found that population sizes had declined by 69 per cent on average since 1970…

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Deforestation, human exploitation, pollution, and climate change were the biggest drivers of the loss…The rapid decline shows ‘that nature is unravelling and the natural world is emptying,’ said Andrew Terry, director of conservation and policy at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL)…Wildlife populations in Latin America and the Caribbean were hit especially hard, experiencing a 94 per cent drop in just fifty years…Africa had the second largest fall at 66 per cent, followed by Asia and the Pacific with 55 per cent…North American animal populations declined by an average of 20 per cent, while Europe and Central Asia experienced an 18 per cent fall…

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Some species have experienced precipitous declines in short periods of time…[One] population of pink river dolphins in the Brazilian Amazon plummeted by 65 per cent between 1994 and 2016…[Wildlife population sizes are declining] at a rate of about 2.5 per cent per year.” click here for more

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