Wildlife populations in tropical regions are plummeting at a staggering rate and freshwater species populations have globally been reduced by 83 percent, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said on Thursday.

There is no time to lose in securing a nature-positive society, it warned in the 14th edition of its biennial Living Planet Report 2022.

Across the globe, monitored wildlife populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish have seen a devastating 69-percent decline on average since 1970.

In a video interview with Xinhua, WWF International's Director General Marco Lambertini said that "The figures are shocking and confirm the fact that our way of living, consuming and producing is just simply not sustainable. The impact on the natural world is immense."

"We need to restore what's possible and we need to sustainably manage the rest. That means we need to transition the 'Big Five' economic drivers of nature loss: agriculture, fishing, infrastructure, extractives and forestry from nature-negative to nature-positive practices," Lambertini said.

The data set in the report features almost 32,000 populations of 5,230 species.

The Living Planet Index (LPI) within the report, provided by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), shows that between 1970 and 2018, monitored wildlife populations in Latin America and the Caribbean region declined by 94 percent on average.

It also revealed that in less than a lifetime, monitored freshwater populations have fallen by an average of 83 percent, the largest decline of any species group.

Habitat loss and barriers to migration routes are responsible for about half of the threats to monitored migratory fish species.

(Cover image via CFP)

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