IWN Report — Sunday, 11 October 2026
Wild animal populations monitored around the world have shrunk by an average of 73 per cent since 1970, and a new global assessment says tigers are among the few species showing that the slide can be reversed.
WWF published its Living Planet Report 2026 on 7 October. The report draws on the Living Planet Index, which follows 35,803 population trends across 5,790 vertebrate species between 1970 and 2022, and it lists tigers, green sea turtles, southern African elephants and Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna as populations that are recovering.
WWF’s chief scientist said in the release that those recoveries make a turnaround “more than a hope”, and the organisation also warns that the gains will not last unless the underlying drivers of nature loss are tackled.
Freshwater populations have fallen furthest, by 85 per cent on average, against 69 per cent on land and 59 per cent at sea. WWF reports an average fall of 49 per cent across the Asia–Pacific region, compared with 80 per cent in Africa and 95 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
About half of the monitored populations are stable (7 per cent) or increasing (43 per cent), although WWF says the larger declines outweigh those gains. The dataset now covers 967 more populations and 295 more species than the 2024 report.
WWF names habitat loss and degradation, overexploitation, climate change, pollution, invasive species and disease among the drivers of decline, and puts the annual biodiversity finance gap at $942 billion.
WWF’s release does not break the tiger recovery down by country. For India, the Press Information Bureau (PIB) reported when it released the 2022 All India Tiger Estimation report on 29 July 2023 that the population averaged 3,682 tigers, within a range of 3,167 to 3,925, growing at 6.1 per cent a year.
In July, ahead of International Tiger Day, PIB said India holds nearly 70 per cent of the world’s wild tigers, and that Project Tiger covers 58 tiger reserves across 18 states, according to the National Tiger Conservation Authority’s 2023 report.
Sources: WWF press release, 7 October 2026 · WWF, Living Planet Report 2026 · PIB, All India Tiger Estimation 2022 report · PIB, International Tiger Day release