Posted on October, 08 2026
Every plant, animal, fungus and microorganism on Earth is part of a single living system, and we are part of it too.
Biodiversity, the variety of life and the ecological relationships that connect it, makes that system work. The food we grow depends on pollinators and the soil microbes that keep cropland productive. Drinking water depends on intact watersheds. Most medicines in our pharmacies originated in molecules first identified in plants, fungi or microorganisms. The climate we depend on is regulated by forests, oceans, peatlands and grasslands. And the economy itself, expressed as a number, rests on these services: about half of global GDP, roughly US$58 trillion in 2023, comes from work that depends in some way on nature. When biodiversity is degraded, the things built on it are degraded along with it.
That degradation is now happening at a pace without precedent in human history. The Living Planet Index (LPI) measures the average change in the size of monitored populations of vertebrate species around the world: mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Between 1970 and 2022, the populations the LPI follows declined by an average of 73%. Other measures of biodiversity describe different parts of the same picture. The Red List Index tracks how the extinction risk of species is changing. The Biodiversity Intactness Index estimates how much of a region's original biodiversity remains compared with pre-industrial conditions. Records of documented extinctions show that species are now disappearing at rates 100 times or more above the pre-human background rate. The four indicators approach biodiversity from different angles, and they point in the same direction.
The global LPI is a global average, so it hides local details. Some regions are losing wildlife much faster than others, while some species and ecosystems are stable or recovering. About half of the populations the global LPI tracks are stable or increasing. This matters because it tells us that decline is not fixed in place. Where people have done the work, wildlife has come back.