No room to roam: The cost of a crowded planet for wild animals

Over the past fifty years, the average size of monitored wildlife populations around the world has fallen by 73 per cent, according to WWF's Living Planet Report 2024. The report names loss and degradation of habitat as the most commonly reported threat, driven mainly by how the world grows its food.This finding raises a plain question. When animals lose the land, water and forest they depend on, what happens to them?A shrinking home, not a vanishing oneHabitat rarely disappears all at once. It is cut into pieces by farms, roads, canals, railway lines, power lines and growing towns. Each piece may still have trees and water, but it supports fewer animals than the original whole did.The 73 per cent figure also needs careful reading. It describes the average change across thousands of monitored populations.