Nearly 6,000 monitored vertebrate species across more than 35,000 populations declined by an average of 73% from 1970 to 2022, the World Wide Fund for Nature said in its latest Living Planet Report published on Thursday.
We are the next great mass extinction event and in some ways our impact is already faster (and this far in, harder) than most of our previous mass extinction events. But hey, billionaires need a few more yachts and need endless growth even if it literally kills the planet. So thats a price we are willing to pay for them. We should be rioting.
This is a famously difficult to interpret statistic. It’s an excellent survey, but you probably do not understand what the number means (because it is a weird number). In particular, only half of species surveyed showed a population decline at all, the other half either grew or were stagnant.
The authors of the LPI go to great lengths to explain this. Yet, there is inevitably a long list of headlines claiming that we’ve “lost 73% of wildlife”, “73% of species have gone extinct”, or “73% of species are declining”. All of these are incorrect.
To give you another sense that this number is weird:
The 2022 Living Planet Index reported an average decline of 69% since 1970. In 2024, it reported a 73% decline. And this latest report finds the same: 73%.
So, what exactly is this 73% number?
To obtain the final LPI number, researchers take the geometric mean of the rates of change across all these populations. They also provide different weights to different populations, which affects the final result.
I don’t know other places where I’d take the geometric mean. I have no intuition for it. So… caution advised.
i wish people stopped calling it “human driven”. it’s capitalism and colonialism driven. the sooner we realise this, the sooner we can put an end to it
100% behind you regarding the devastating impact of capitalism on society and ecology.
However, the mass extinction began at the end of the Pleistocene with the megafauna. From the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages, humans never behaved sustainably.
Now that we have the scientific method and we are able to predict accurately the consequences of our actions, I want to believe that our spieces is able to change. Currently, capitalism is one of the main force against improvement.
yea, it’s a pattern that has repeated itself. humans come to a new place, wipe out the megafauna thru hunting them to extinction, then a new sustainable equilibrium is formed, with humans as a full part of the ecosystem. really, it’s what happens whenever a new species is introduced to somewhere: big changes to the ecosystem then the formation of a new normal.
but capitalism and colonialism have disrupted, and continue to disrupt, this equilibrium, more than ever before. and the difference is, we can act upon it. it’s not easy of course, but these systems can be overthrown. when you just blanket-blame humanity, what’s the implied solution? collective suicide?
Well, my hope is that humanity was so destructive out of ignorance. I hope that science and education, or in general the knowledge of how we impact the world and the consequences, lead to wiser choices. This could be for egotistical reasons (a healthy ecosystem leads to easier life for humans), or out of respect for other life forms.
