Harare (New Ziana) —The average size of populations of wildlife across the African continent has declined significantly over the past 50 years, putting biodiversity under threat, recent studies have shown.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)’s Living Planet Report (LPR) 2024 reveals that Africa has experienced a decline of 76 per cent in the size of monitored vertebrate wildlife populations between 1970 and 2020, driven primarily by habitat loss, overexploitation, pollution, and the impacts of climate change.
The alarming trend highlights the urgent need for transformative action to safeguard Africa’s natural ecosystems and the livelihoods that depend on them. The decline globally is at 73 per cent.
launched during a virtual media briefing of African environmental journalists on Tuesday, The WWF LRP report warns that the continued degradation of Africa’s ecosystems could push the region past critical tipping points without immediate interventions.
As ecosystems cross these thresholds, their ability to support both wildlife and human livelihoods becomes compromised, with severe consequences for food security, water availability, and climate resilience.
The WWF is an independent conservation organization, with over 30 million supporters and a global network active in over 100 countries.
Its work focuses on stopping the degradation of the Earth’s natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature.
The LPR 2024 is the 15th edition of WWF’s biennial flagship publication.
Martin Kabaluapa, regional director for the Congo Basin at WWF, said: “Africa’s biodiversity is calling for urgent action. The interlinked crises of nature loss and climate change are pushing African wildlife and ecosystems to their limits, with global tipping points threatening to destabilize entire ecosystems. The catastrophic consequences of
losing some of Africa’s most precious species, from forest elephants to gorillas and ecosystems, would reverberate across the world.”
The report offers some hope though, indicating that Mountain Gorillas in the Greater Virunga Landscape of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose numbers had plummeted, have rebounded by 3 percent between 2010 and 2016 due to successful conservation efforts.
Alice Ruhweza, senior director for Policy Influence and Engagement at WWF, stated: “We must realize that conservation by itself is not enough to bend the curve, and we need a systems shift.”
“However, we have the tools, the knowledge, and the opportunity to reverse these trends if we act now. It is critical we scale up nature-based solutions across Africa to address the interconnected biodiversity loss and climate change crises. Reforestation, wetland restoration, and agro-forestry projects not only help to preserve biodiversity but also enhance livelihoods by providing jobs, improving food security, and increasing resilience to climate change,” she added.
The international biodiversity and climate summits taking place this year, COP16 (in Cali, Colombia from 21 October to 1 November) and COP29 (in Baku, Azerbaijan from 11 to 22 November) respectively, are an opportunity for countries to rise to the scale of the challenge.
The WWF calls for countries to produce and implement more ambitious national nature and climate plans that include measures to reduce global overconsumption, halt and reverse domestic and imported biodiversity loss, and cut emissions – all equitably.
It also urges governments to unlock greater public and private funding to allow action at scale and to better align their climate, nature and sustainable development policies and actions.
African countries have already committed to halting and reversing nature loss under the Global Biodiversity Framework and tackling climate change through the Paris Agreement.
Yet, the LPR warns that national biodiversity strategies and action plans are falling short, with critical tipping points like the degradation of coral reefs, savannah ecosystems, and rain forests still looming.
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