Does an 80% fall in Africa's wildlife mean four in five animals are gone?

Does an 80% fall in Africa's wildlife mean four in five animals have disappeared? No. The figure is an average of how much monitored animal populations have grown or shrunk since 1970. It is not a count of animals or populations lost, according to WWF, which publishes the Living Planet Report. The Star reported on 9 October that it does not mean Africa has lost 80% of its wildlife species. The report's index is compiled by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

WWF published the 2026 edition of the report on 8 October, according to its UK press release. The Star reported on 9 October that monitored wildlife populations in Africa fell by an average of 80% between 1970 and 2022. The global average was 73%. The report puts Latin America and the Caribbean at 95%, Asia-Pacific at 49%, North America at 28% and Europe and Central Asia at 23%.

The measure is the Living Planet Index, and WWF's press release names Dr Louise McRae of ZSL's Institute of Zoology as leading the research behind it. For every population in the data, researchers work out how fast its numbers changed over time. They then take the geometric mean of those rates of change across all populations, wrote Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data on 8 October. Think of a bus company that averages each route's percentage change in passengers, rather than adding up all the passengers.

The 2026 index draws on 35,803 population trends of 5,790 vertebrate species from 1970 to 2022, according to WWF. Vertebrates means mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Insects, corals, fungi and plants are not in it, Our World in Data says.

WWF says the percentage reflects the cumulative average proportional change in monitored populations, not the number of animals or populations lost. Ritchie wrote that exactly 50% of the populations were in decline, 43% were increasing and 7% were stable. WWF's notes to editors say the declining trends are larger in magnitude than the increasing ones, which is why the average is negative.

Our World in Data says the data is not globally representative, because some regions have much more data than others, and that the figure is sensitive to outliers. Walter Jetz, a Yale ecology professor not involved with the index, said that its figures should not be used as an overall measure of biodiversity loss, the New York Times reported in October 2024. David Murrell, a University College London biology professor who has worked with the index's authors on assessing its reliability, called the index "one of our best guesstimates for the trends in animal groups" in the same article.

The 2024 edition, covering 1970 to 2020, gave Africa 76%, Engineering News reported on 11 October 2024. Since then the number of African populations in the index has risen by 14% and the number of species by 38%, which Ritchie describes as a deliberate effort to improve coverage. She wrote that the new indices should not be seen as simple extensions of the previous ones.

WWF's notes say African savannah elephants are declining across much of their range and remain Endangered overall, while some southern African populations are increasing. The Star reported that the report links such gains to places where legal frameworks give local communities a direct stake in managing wildlife, and that forest elephant numbers have fallen by more than 60% over past decades, according to WWF wildlife inventory reports.

Kenya has its own national wildlife census. The 2021 census, run by the Tourism ministry, the Kenya Wildlife Service and the Wildlife Research and Training Institute, counted 36,280 elephants, 897 black rhinos, 842 white rhinos and 2,589 lions, The Star reported on 31 August 2021. Fieldwork ran from April to July 2021, and the census was meant to set a national baseline.

Yvonne Godo, WWF's regional director for East and Southern Africa, said the question is not whether recovery is possible, but whether people and wildlife can thrive together, The Star reported on 9 October. Durrel Halleson, WWF Africa's head of policy and partnerships, called the findings a stark warning but also a mandate for action, as African countries head into Biodiversity COP17 and Climate COP31 and prepare to host COP32 in Addis Ababa.