By JOHN MUCHANGI AND GILBERT KOECH
A new report has shown that Africa has experienced a decline of 76 per cent in the size of monitored wildlife between 1970 and 2020.
The decline, reported in the World Wide Fund for Nature Living Planet Report 2024, was driven primarily by habitat loss, overexploitation, pollution and the impacts of climate change.
This loss relates to vertebrates — animals that have backbones. They include fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. The alarming trend highlights the urgent need for action to safeguard Africa’s natural ecosystems and the livelihoods that depend on them.
The decline globally is at 73 per cent. 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. Regional Director for the Congo Basin at WWF, Martin Kabaluapa, 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 destabilise 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, reporting that Mountain Gorillas in the Greater Virunga Landscape of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose numbers had plummeted, have rebounded by three per cent between 2010 and 2016 due to successful conservation eff orts.
“We must realise 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,” WWF Senior Director for Policy Influence and Engagement Alice Ruhweza said.
“We must scale up nature-based solutions across Africa to address the interconnected biodiversity loss and climate change crises.
Reforestation, wetland restoration and agroforestry 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 and COP29 – are an opportunity for countries to rise to the scale of the challenge.
WWF calls for countries to produce and implement 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.
WWF 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.
African countries have committed to halting and reversing nature
loss under the Global Biodiversity
Framework and tackling climate
change through the Paris Agreement.