Living Planet Report: Wildlife Is Declining. But There's Hope.

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In this episode of Nature Breaking, host Seth Larson sits down with Dr. Rebecca Shaw, WWF's Chief Scientist and editor-in-chief of this year's report, to unpack what that number really means — and why, despite the sobering data, this year's report is subtitled "The Science of Hope."

You'll hear Rebecca explain how the Living Planet Index works, why a global average can hide real bright spots (nearly half of all monitored populations are actually stable or increasing), and how species like tigers, bluefin tuna, Southern African elephants, and green sea turtles have rebounded thanks to decades of coordinated, global effort. She also introduces the report's concept of "positive tipping points" — using the global renewable energy transition as a real-world example of a system that has already tipped toward self-sustaining change — and explains why food systems and finance are still in an earlier "enabling phase," with tipping points potentially just years away.

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Dr. Rebecca Shaw bio

2026 Living Planet Report

TRANSCRIPT:

Seth Larson: In 2010, there were only about 3,200 wild tigers left on the planet. Today, there are nearly 5,700. But that success story exists inside a darker picture. According to WWF's just released Living Planet Report, vertebrate wildlife populations monitored since 1970 have declined by an average of over 70%. So which is it?

Is nature in free fall, or is there real reason for hope? Today on Nature Breaking, WWF's chief scientist joins me to unpack this year's report and make the case that both things can be true at once. Stick around!

Welcome to Nature Breaking, a podcast produced by World Wildlife Fund. I'm Seth Larson. Today, we've got a special episode outside our usual schedule because WWF just released its latest Living Planet Report. That's our flagship report that serves as a kind of checkup on the health of our planet.

This year's report finds that monitored wildlife populations have declined by an average of 73% since 1970. We'll dig into what that number means and how it compares to past reports, but this year's report also comes with new framing. While the 2024 report was called A System in Peril, this year's edition is subtitled The Science of Hope. And while it still unveils sobering data about the state of our planet, it also highlights real recovery stories: species like tigers, bluefin tuna, savanna elephants, and green sea turtles that have rebounded thanks to sustained conservation work. And it makes the case that hope itself, backed by science, can be a genuine driver of large-scale change. Joining me to unpack all of this is Dr. Rebecca Shaw, WWF's chief scientist who served as editor-in-chief of this year's report. She'll help us understand what's behind this year's numbers, why the report leads with hope instead of alarm, and what it will actually take to turn today's pockets of progress into lasting global change.

Before we get started, don't forget to subscribe to Nature Breaking on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you watch or listen. And now, here's my conversation with Dr. Rebecca Shaw.

Alright, Dr. Rebecca Shaw, welcome back to Nature Breaking. It's so good to have you here again.

Rebecca Shaw: Oh my goodness, I love coming here every two years and talking to you about the state of the planet.

Seth Larson: This has become a tradition. I think you were one of the first few interviews I did when we launched our podcast back in 2022, and I had a chance to talk to you again in 2024, and now here we are in 2026. And we're here to talk about the Living Planet Report. Since it's been a couple years, I wonder if you can maybe give our listeners a little bit of a refresh about what exactly this report is about and maybe talk a little bit about the Living Planet Index that undergirds the report, and just kind of give us a reminder about all that.

Rebecca Shaw: Yeah. So the Living Planet Report, which we call the LPR, comes out every two years, and it is WWF's flagship report on the state of the planet, the state of nature, and what we're doing about it and what we need to do about it moving forward. We use the Living Planet Index, that we developed in partnership with the Zoological Society of London. We use… it's an index that tells us how wild animal populations are doing on average across the globe.

Seth Larson: Right.

Rebecca Shaw: In marine systems, on land, and in freshwater. How are they doing, and how have they been doing for the last fifty years? That gives us an indication of is nature thriving or is nature in trouble?

Seth Larson: Yeah. And I know each year the report chronicles a number of things under that rubric, but there's usually a sort of top line finding about how much decline we've seen in the populations we're monitoring.

So I'm curious what this year's report found as the sort of top line finding in terms of how populations are doing this time around?

Rebecca Shaw: So the Living Planet Index or the LPI found that in the last fifty-two years, between 1970 and today, we've seen a 73% decline in wildlife populations across the planet. That's...

Seth Larson: Wow

Rebecca Shaw: ...average all the way across the planet, across mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles. Really a significant decline in populations.

Seth Larson: Yeah. And just to put a finer point on that, that doesn't mean that we've lost 73% of all species on Earth since 1970. That is average of each species population that we've been monitoring has declined by 73%, some much more, some much less, but it's a global average of each individual population, right?

Rebecca Shaw: That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

Seth Larson: Okay, so 73%, I think that's actually about exactly the same or close to the same as the number that was included in the 2024 report. Should we read that to mean that we're doing a good job and that species loss is stabilizing over the last couple years? Or what else should we be taking away from that number?

Rebecca Shaw: That... the way the LPI is calculated, you shouldn't view it as a trend from the last time. What it means is that we had a significant decline of 73% since 1970 in 2024, and we have that, that same decline. We added a lot of other, species populations this year to deal with some data gaps that we had, and we're confirming that it is 73% decline since 1970. Yeah. Very significant.

Seth Larson: Yeah. Okay. So this year's report is subtitled The Science of Hope, which, you know, given the number that you just spoke about and everything that I think we all read in the news all the time about the state of the environment and record ocean temperatures and wildfires and floods, The Science of Hope might ring as a surprising tune for us to be striking in this moment. And maybe a little counterintuitive for some of our listeners. So I wondered if you could talk a little bit about why you and your team chose that title for this report, and why you wanted to lead with hope, despite kind of what we see in the world around us.

Rebecca Shaw: Yeah. I think that we realized, and what's really important to convey, is that when you have headline indicators that are global, like the LPI or like many of the others we use in conservation, they're an average of what's going on around the globe, and they don't give you an indication if things are trending better or worse in specific places, or if what we're doing is actually working in some instances.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Rebecca Shaw: And allow us to learn from that. So while we see the global aggregate indicator as -73 which is really drastic, we do have a lot of species, a lot of populations, that are either stable or increasing. In fact, almost half are stable or increasing.

Seth Larson: Oh, wow.

Rebecca Shaw: That, the way the indicator comes together, the overall picture is a 73% decline. What we should be doing, though, is recognizing that it's a 73% decline, and that is not good for the planet or for people.

Seth Larson: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Shaw: But then we should move to say, "What have we been doing that's working? Where are we seeing bright spots? What populations are increasing? Why? And how can we do more of that and do it at scales that are relevant so we can begin to see those changes in the global aggregate indicator?"

Does that make sense? So we want to lean in on what's working, really understand that really well, and pivot our work to go after those things that are working really well.

Seth Larson: Yeah. So the report does include a number of specific examples that highlight some of those hopeful examples of species recovery. I think it specifically calls out tigers and bluefin tuna, Southern African elephants, and green sea turtles, among others. And the report makes clear that those recoveries didn't happen in a vacuum, and it actually specifies that hope itself was a key shared ingredient in each of their successes, which I thought was really interesting and kind of surprising to read.

Can you pick maybe just one of those examples from the report of a species that's recovered and talk about how hope conspired with a number of other factors to drive positive change for that species?

Rebecca Shaw: Yeah, I think one of the things when you look at the successes, and all these species were picked as successes because they were downlisted, meaning...

Seth Larson: Mm-hmm

Rebecca Shaw: ...they had been endangered and now they're no longer endangered. They're still threatened, but we're making so much progress at a global scale that they're doing so much better that they could be downlisted. And the way we work with them changes when that happens.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Rebecca Shaw: The first thing I want to say is you've got to recognize that we're doing a lot of things really good, and we're doing a lot of things really good at scale. And when you deconstruct how that's happening, it takes decades. You have international commitments that flow all the way down to communities, and everybody in society plays their part. Hope, and the way scientists and psychology define hope, is that you have a goal, a really big goal. Let's save green sea turtles. They are on the endangered species list, and we want to make sure that they persist long into the future.

Seth Larson: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Shaw: So set goals. Whether you're a community or you're the international you're international organization, you set goals. You have a pathway to those goals, and you have agency to create change. You know you can make a difference, and so you go after it, and you go after it with fortitude even when you meet challenges. You're resilient, and you work around that. That is the construct of hope in psychology. So you have a goal, you have a...

Seth Larson: Got it.

Rebecca Shaw: ...pathway to that goal, and you have the agency and resilience to achieve that goal.

Seth Larson: Mm-hmm

Rebecca Shaw: What we found with, say, green sea turtles, which we as a conservation sector have been working on recovery for almost fifty years, that when you have that collective hope, you can make real change. So green sea turtles are in five sea... five oceans and many seas, and seven of the... five of the seven populations of green sea turtles were downlisted. What does it take to do that? What does it take to actually have such recovery in a species that nests in, on beaches in eighty different countries, goes into the high seas and crosses shipping lines, gets tangled up in commercial fishery nets, gets tangled up in long lines, is put on the plate, on a plate for turtle soup? What does it take to turn that around? It means communities everywhere are working to protect nesting beaches. Their tourist organizations are working to protect nesting beaches. Fisheries and everybody and shipping, shipping liners are all working and changing their behavior to protect this species that goes from the beaches to the high seas and back to beaches and to the high seas again. And they do it across multiple oceans, vast territories. So from the international scale down to the community level people had a goal, they had a pathway to that goal that meant that they could achieve, they had an agency to reach that goal, and we did it in concert. And all those activities coordinated across the globe delivered a species that is on the recovery.

That's an amazing success that we should be celebrating. So we know how to do this really well. It's not going to show up in that global indicator, the LPI.

Seth Larson: Yep.

Rebecca Shaw: But it shows up, and people need to know how much it takes to do this 'cause it's not easy, but we do it in a shared... and shared activity around the globe together, and that's amazing.

Seth Larson: Yeah, and as you just said at the beginning of your last answer, there were, whether it's with green sea turtles or any of these species that have had some level of recovery, there are always those moments of hurdles and setbacks and difficulties along the way that could have just demoralized the participants to just throw up their hands and say, "Well, this is impossible. We give up." But because they had that hope and that persistence, together collectively, that was an important thing, an important part of the sort of stew that came together to ultimately, over the course of many years and many, communities and places, drive that big change, right?

Rebecca Shaw: That's right. That's right. And we, again, we saw the same thing. And what I don't... When you see these, species like this getting down-listed, you've got to understand how much goes into that over decades by so many people around the planet. That's what makes the kind of change we're seeing, and that's the kind of message we want.

That's the hope. That's what we can create. We also saw, though, Seth, that's really, important to pay attention to is even though we've created these change and are on the pathway to recovering many of these species, tigers, elephants, bluefin tuna, green sea turtles, and others, those wins and that pathway to recovery is blocked by the drivers of change that are not being addressed by conservation of species by species.

Seth Larson: Yeah

Rebecca Shaw: And that's where we pivot in the report to say, "We know how to do this at really big scales, but now we need to go after the drivers of change that are going to forever undermine those species and all species on the planet. We need...

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Rebecca Shaw: ...to take that kind of hope and construct to creating positive tipping points toward the drivers of change."

Seth Larson: Yeah. Thank you for mentioning positive tipping points. That's exactly what I was going to ask you about next. So the report really leans into this, term, positive tipping points. And it's, we're, I think a lot of us are used to hearing about negative tipping points. Certainly negative tipping points were discussed in the last Living Planet Report two years ago. One of the ones a lot of people may be familiar with in the conservation space is a lot of us are worried about the Amazon Rainforest hitting a negative tipping point where if too much of the forest is cut down, it could cause a sort of domino effect that leads to the forest becoming a dry savanna.

But this report really leans on these positive tipping points as a concept, and I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about where that concept came from and maybe give an example of what a positive tipping point looks like from the report.

Rebecca Shaw: Yeah, the... I think the important thing to recognize is the species examples... these, where we're recovering populations around the globe, are not an example of a positive tipping point. Because the positive tipping point, like a negative tipping point, you have an incremental phase where things are changing, and then you hit a point where the changes run away. It's just self-reinforcing to a new stable state. These conservation outcomes that we've achieved are not self-reinforcing. They're taking input, over and over again, unless we deal with the underlying drivers of change that are undermining them.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Rebecca Shaw: And that includes energy sector, which drives climate change, which is a really big factor in changes in species populations...

Seth Larson: Mm-hmm

Rebecca Shaw: ...around the globe for a whole variety of reasons. And then the food sector. Like, we talked about this in the last report too.

Seth Larson: Yep.

Rebecca Shaw: The food drives climate change. Nearly a third of all greenhouse gas emissions come from the food sector. But I think even more importantly, it drives habitat destruction on land and overharvest in the ocean. And so you have these pressures that are nonstop on these populations in the energy sector and in the food sector, and then you have financing that reinforces all that bad activity.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Rebecca Shaw: So the three sectors we really have to change are the energy sector, the food sector, and the financing of both of those.

Seth Larson: Yep.

Rebecca Shaw: So when we think about doing that, so think about the green sea turtle. So the green sea turtle, you got fishing lanes... you got fishing... all these nets that are being changed to allow turtles to go through. You have a lot of care to omit bycatch. You have nesting beaches that are being cleared or conserved for those, those green sea turtles. But if you don't... if you don't go after the completely... the systemic changes that drive the pressure on the green sea turtle, then we won't be successful over time. So what we say, what we look at in the report is what was a positive tipping point? It means you work on something just like those, the conservation of those species. You work on one of these issues, energy, food, or finance in a whole of society kind of way. In a...

Seth Larson: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Shaw: ...in a concerted and multifaceted approach, in an enabling phase that allows you to hit a tipping point where the economics and the social contagion takes hold, and it's a runaway, and so you go to a new stable state. And what we would like is for energy to go to a new stable state, food to go to a new stable state, and the financing system to go to a new stable state where they support nature and regenerate nature as opposed to deplete it. Now, I'm going to stop there because it's important to understand that to get a positive tipping point, you can create that. We can create those. We are creating them. And just like conservation, it takes decades for this to get to a place where you have a tipping point 'cause you do you spend so much work in that enabling phase getting things to work. One thing that's working right now that is undeniable is that renewable energy at a global scale and its implementation and its uptake has hit a global tipping point.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Rebecca Shaw: It started because this country or this state or this nation or this community began to adopt renewable energy as its dominant energy source for electricity or for powering transport. That's supported by the market, it's supported by financing, it's supported by policies. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will, because so many communities and nations are doing it around the globe that the financing makes sense, the economics makes sense, and it becomes runaway. And so at this point, renewable energy to power electricity will be dominant. It is already in this self-reinforcing phase where most electricity on the planet will be generated by renewable energies because it makes sense for cultures, for economies, and for financing around the globe. That's a really cool thing. A lot of other things we need to do in energy besides just implementing renewable energy, but that is a really important runaway tipping point that is really exciting to watch.

Seth Larson: Right. Yeah, no, I think, I love that example. It's super helpful, and I think a lot of people may not even realize yet that we're at that tipping point because, like you said, it's not the... it's not by itself enough in the energy sector for renewable energy to have hit that tipping point. We still have a lot of fossil fuels that are powering our grid in the United States and electricity grids around the world. Those energy sources need to be cleaned up and transitioned to renewables more quickly. That's not happening as fast as we would like to see. But this shift from solar and wind and other renewables being a, just a concept and, like, in a demonstration phase maybe on some private piece of property somewhere 20 or 30 years ago to now being not only widely deployed, but making up for the vast majority of new energy that's coming onto the grid globally year over year, it is... we're in such a different place now than we were even 10 years ago. So I think that's a really interesting point to focus in on.

Rebecca Shaw: Exactly. And so in the report, we've got to transform the energy system, and we're well, well on the way to do that in renewable energy. We're in... We've passed the tipping point, and we're in moving towards a stable state. We really lean into energy systems to describe how tipping points happen, how you create them, how you create the enabling conditions, what kind of activity happens in places, many different places around the globe, so you can get to that tipping point where it becomes self-sustaining. So we use that as an example, and then we play... we take that example, and we describe what's happening in the food system right now, food and agriculture. So that includes the way we produce food, and collect food, say in fisheries. It's, it includes how we consume and how we consume it and what we waste. That... we're still in the enabling phase in the system. But if you take cues from what has been going on in renewable energy and the energy sector for the last forty years, and you apply them to the food system, which we've only really been at it for about twenty years, you can see that we are on our way to getting to a tipping point. And with smarter thinking, there's a lot of good things happening, with smarter thinking, more strategic plans and coordinated action, we will be at a tipping point in the next two to ten years on food systems as well.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Rebecca Shaw: We will because people want it, and there's so much good stuff happening around the world that is contributing to those enabling conditions to get us to a tipping point. We did the same thing with the finance sector. We think that because the finance sector has... that really contributes to underwriting all the bad stuff in energy and the food system is so much smaller, there's fewer actors. We do think that could tip faster, but the lift is heavier. The lift is heavier, and we're still in the enabling phase of the, of changing finance. But there's a lot of, of financial institutions that are understanding the materiality or why destroying nature is bad for business. The materiality of a destabilized climate and the materiality of the loss of nature. And they're beginning to incorporate it into the way they assess their investments and the way they understand risk. And that is a gamechanger for us. And the conservation community has, has played a really big role in helping the finance community set the metrics, set the indicators to understand that materiality and that risk so...

Seth Larson: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Shaw: ...they can begin incorporating it into the way they do their operations. So that change is happening too. We're in the enabling phase. We're not in the, we're not in the runaway, haven't hit the tipping point, and we're not in the runaway accelerating phase, we're really close to a tipping point. We just need a few of the really big actors to move in a big way.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Rebecca Shaw: Super exciting to think about it that way.

Seth Larson: It is and it's great to hear you talk about the trajectory of the finance sector in particular in a hopeful way because the report mentions the fact, a couple times I think, that we have this global nature finance gap of about $1.3 trillion. And basically what that means is there's an estimate out there, I think we need about $1.6 trillion invested in nature every year to pay for everything from forest conservation to ocean conservation to keeping rivers and other things intact. All the work that needs to go into that would cost about $1.6 trillion. We're putting in about $300 billion a year currently, which is leaving this gap of about $1.3 trillion.

So that's, that seems like a huge problem and it's so much money when you start talking about upwards of a trillion dollars, it feels like maybe my whole life could go by before we close that gap all the way. But you're seeing things that make you hopeful that we're actually closer than I might think.

Rebecca Shaw: Yeah, and again it's like what happened in renewable energy as being... as leading in electricity generation in online activity. It just makes good financial sense. It's cleaner, it's cheaper, it can be easily deployed, and distributed, and where that really matters in some places like Pakistan, which went renewable in one year because it was the only way they could electrify their country. So everything lines up to make that choice make sense. That is happening in the finance sector as well. When you start realizing the way in which the depletion of nature and the destabilized climate disrupts your bottom line, begins to create losses on your balance sheet of your investments, then all of a sudden, you pay attention.

And that's what's happening right now as the impacts of nature's decline and the impacts of a destabilized climate begin to show us what actually is at stake.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Rebecca Shaw: More and more people are paying attention and then turning to, "what are we going to do about this and how do we if this makes financial good financial sense, what do we do and how fast do we do it so that we can get away from those losses and decrease those risks?" And that's why finance, change in the finance system, looks to be pretty promising because it's so material, the risks are so huge, and those risks are being felt now in a real economic way.

Seth Larson: Yeah. Rebecca, I have just one more question for you before I let you go today. You know, the report frames 2030 as a pretty important deadline. It's really… it's not a symbolic one, and of course, not coincidentally, 2030 is also the year that the UN's Global Biodiversity Framework has identified as the year by which we need to halt and reverse nature loss. With the clock ticking now in the year 2026, what would you say is the single most important thing that needs to happen in the next few years to secure a future for nature and to reverse the declines that are chronicled in the Living Planet Report?

Rebecca Shaw: So we have global goals that are really solid for the protection of biodiversity.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Rebecca Shaw: And nature and for climate. And for protecting all of the services that come from climate and nature that we depend on to grow our foods and to have a healthy society. So we have those goals. So the important thing is to pay attention to those 2030 goals and targets, and implement them, with fervor. Know that our, we, because there's so much momentum built into the system, and it takes decades to get these kind of changes, get committed now, make sure that we have significant outcomes in 2030, make sure that it's we have a stable climate recovered nature by 2050. The UN goals are set so that we have doable time steps, but our real goal is 2050 where have recovered nature and we have a stable climate. And we can't let go of that 2050 ultimate goal. This 2030 is a milestone towards achieving that, and it's really important that we hit those goals and targets in the, on the road to 2050.

Seth Larson: Got it. So we've got to get ourselves on the right... pointed in the right direction now in the next couple years so that we don't end up way off track when it comes to 2050, right? Yeah.

Rebecca Shaw: That's right and implementing positive tipping points in a concerted way in those three sectors will really help us get to those that both hit our 2050 goals and our... 2050 ultimate goals and our 2030 targets.

Seth Larson: Yeah. Well, Rebecca, thank you to you and your team for leading in the drafting of the Living Planet Report, and thank you for your time walking me through it today. I really appreciate these opportunities, like you said, to touch base every couple years and find out what the latest news is. So thank you very much and have a great day.

Rebecca Shaw: Yeah. Thanks, Seth, and I'll see you in two years.

Seth Larson: See you then. That’s all for today. Thanks again to Dr. Shaw for joining Nature Breaking and walking us through the 2026 Living Planet Report. As she made clear, while the report underscores the urgent need to halt and reverse the loss of nature, it also shows how hope paired with community dedication and scientific rigor can come together to create positive tipping points. Now it's on us to hold onto that hope and think about how each of us can contribute toward those tipping points in our own way. For now, thank you so much for watching and listening, and together, let's keep building a more sustainable future.