The 2024 Living Planet Index reports a 73% average decline in wildlife populations — what’s changed since the last report?

The 2024 Living Planet Index report is published today and makes for some grim reading.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, we 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, so we’ll link to those when we can if you want to dig deeper.

The headline figure from the 2024 update of the LPI is that studied wildlife populations have seen an average decline of 73% from 1970 through 2020.

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