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The population sizes of more than 4,000 animal species around the globe have shrunk by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014. That “grim” assessment comes from the latest report by the WWF’s Living Planet Index, which has tracked nearly 17,000 populations of terrestrial and aquatic vertebrates for more than four decades.
The declines are humans’ fault, according to the report. “Exploding human consumption is the driving force behind the unprecedented planetary change we are witnessing, through the increased demand for energy, land and water. . . . While climate change is a growing threat, the main drivers of biodiversity decline continue to be the overexploitation of species, agriculture and land conversion.”
The constriction of populations has been most dramatic in Central and South America and in the Caribbean: there, vertebrate abundance is only 11 percent of what it was in 1970.
Worldwide, among roughly 3,300 freshwater ...
