Africa’s monitored wildlife populations declined by an average of 80 per cent between 1970 and 2022, highlighting the scale of biodiversity loss across the continent, according to a new report released by World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) on October 8, 2026.
The Living Planet Report 2026: The Science of Hope, found that the average size of monitored wildlife populations globally fell by 73 per cent over the 52-year period between 1970 and 2022.
The findings are based on the Living Planet Index, compiled by the Zoological Society of London, which tracks 35,803 populations representing 5,790 vertebrate species between 1970 and 2022. The figure is an average change in population size, not a count of animals lost.
The Africa index shows a decline of 80 per cent, equivalent to 3.1 per cent per year. Trends were negative across all major animal groups, with monitored freshwater fish among the most severely affected. However, WWF noted that information on freshwater ecosystems in Africa remains limited, underscoring the need for expanded research and targeted conservation.
The report identifies habitat loss, driven largely by agricultural expansion, as the most frequently reported cause of wildlife decline. Overexploitation and climate change are other major pressures. Invasive species can compete with native wildlife for food and habitat, while pollution can directly damage ecosystems or indirectly reduce food availability and reproductive success. Disease is another growing threat, particularly as climate change and habitat degradation can make species more vulnerable to infections.
Despite the alarming trends, WWF points to successful conservation efforts as evidence that wildlife decline is not inevitable. Southern African elephant populations, for example, are stable or increasing in several areas where local communities play a central role in managing wildlife and land.
Community-based natural resource management gives local people rights and responsibilities over wildlife while allowing them to benefit from sustainable stewardship. These efforts, combined with anti-trafficking measures, judicial reforms and efforts to reduce corruption, have helped some elephant populations recover.
However, WWF cautions that these gains remain fragile and can bring new challenges, including human-wildlife conflict and habitat degradation.
The report argues that conservation alone cannot reverse the broader forces driving biodiversity loss. Three systems — energy, food and agriculture, and finance — are central to the crisis. Habitat loss, overexploitation and climate change together account for 67 per cent of biodiversity loss across terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecosystems.
WWF said transforming these systems is therefore essential. In 2023, around $7.3 trillion flowed into activities harmful to nature, compared with only $220 billion for protecting and restoring it.
A positive tipping point occurs when a system surpasses a critical threshold, beyond which beneficial change becomes self-amplifying and difficult to reverse.
The report highlights the possibility of positive tipping points, where sustained policy, investment and public action can push systems toward healthier states.
A positive tipping point has been passed in the energy sector and change is accelerating, with solar power now the cheapest source of new electricity generation in most countries.
In food and agriculture sector, positive change is underway and showing early signs of progressing toward a tipping point, with many people and organisations around the world working towards nature-positive production, promoting sustainable trade and consumption, encouraging healthy and sustainable diets, and reducing food loss and waste.
The finance system is still in the early stages of building toward a tipping point, with the sector needing to work rapidly towards stopping the financing of harmful activities, valuing nature and climate as material risks, creating regulatory certainty and closing an annual $1.3 trillion biodiversity financing gap.
These systemic shifts can be achieved if countries focus on delivering the goals they have agreed to under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and Paris Agreement. With UN conferences on biodiversity and climate taking place in the next two months, governments have a vital opportunity to accelerate the move from ambition to implementation.
For Africa, WWF said, strengthening community-led conservation while transforming the food, energy and financial systems that drive biodiversity loss will be critical to protecting the continent’s wildlife and ecosystems.