By 2020, two-thirds of the world's animal population could be gone

(Image credit: TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images)

published 27 October 2016

If the wildlife population keeps dropping off at the rate it has over the last 40 years, the world could be down to just one-third the wildlife it once had by the year 2020. A new Living Planet assessment by the conservation group World Wildlife Fund (WWF) released Thursday revealed that there was already a "58 percent overall decline in the numbers of fish, mammals, birds, and reptiles worldwide" between 1970 and 2012, which amounts to a 2 percent loss in wildlife populations every single year.

WWF said the data points to an impending sixth extinction that will be almost entirely humans' fault. "We are entering a new era in Earth's history: the Anthropocene. An era in which humans rather than natural forces are the primary drivers of planetary change," Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International, wrote in the report. WWF conservation scientist Martin Taylor explained to CNN that the new era is upon us "because we're using so much of the planet and we're destroying so much of (these animals') habitat."

However, BBC noted that WWF's Living Planet reports "have drawn some criticisms." Though the document delves into trends in 14,152 populations of 3,706 species of vertebrates, some argue the data isn't representative of the entire world's wildlife populations. Duke University conservation ecology professor Stuart Pimm said that the data WWF used from from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is "massively skewed toward Western Europe," and that there is "almost nothing from South America, from tropical Africa."