WWF's Living Planet Report 2026 just landed, and the headline number is a 73 per cent average decline in monitored wildlife populations since 1970. That's the grim bit, and we're not going to dress it up. The hopeful bit is further down the report, and it's worth the scroll.
The number, properly explained
The 73 per cent figure comes from the Living Planet Index, compiled by the Zoological Society of London, covering 35,803 population trends across 5,790 vertebrate species from 1970 to 2022. It's an average, and averages hide a lot: about 7 per cent of monitored populations are stable and 43 per cent are actually increasing. The overall number gets pulled down hard by a smaller group of populations in very steep decline. WWF points to habitat loss and degradation, overexploitation, climate change, pollution, invasive species and disease as the main drivers, and names the global food system as the single biggest cause of habitat loss.
Where "palm oil-free" actually connects to a global report
Naming the food system as the leading driver of habitat loss is precisely the pressure sitting behind every deforestation-free and palm oil-free claim on a personal care label. Ingredients don't start on a shelf, they start on land somewhere, and that land is exactly what this report is measuring. Our formulas are made to our own recipes by trusted contract manufacturers using certified ingredients, but we do control what goes into those formulas and where it's sourced from, which is why reports like this one matter to us well beyond the headline stat. It's the same logic behind why most shampoo bars still contain palm oil, and ours don't, and it's exactly why the groundwork in CSIRO's new regenerative farming trial matters more than its five-year timeline suggests.
The comeback stories, including one in our backyard
Globally, tiger numbers climbed more than 70 per cent between 2010 and 2025, from around 3,200 to roughly 5,700. Pacific and Atlantic bluefin tuna have recovered, and some southern African elephant populations are growing. Closer to home, the picture is mixed rather than uniformly good, which is the honest version worth telling: gentoo penguin breeding pairs on Macquarie Island, the only breeding site for the species in the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean, dropped 50 per cent over 21 years, and rainforest ringtail possums in the Wet Tropics are down 60 to 70 per cent since the early 1990s as warming pushes them out of the lower, warmer edges of their range. But humpback whales migrating along Australia's east coast have gone from somewhere between 200 and 500 animals in 1962 to an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 every single year now, with numbers in Hervey Bay alone still climbing by about 13.4 per cent annually. WWF-Australia CEO Dermot O'Gorman put it simply: nature is under immense pressure, but there are also powerful reminders that it can bounce back.
Source: Global wildlife populations drop by 73%, WWF-Australia, published 7 October 2026.
A 73 per cent average decline reads like the end of the everything, and a massive bummer. But 50,000 humpback whales a year off our coast, up from a few hundred within a generation... well reads like a plot twist that leaves us giving a standing ovation! We're definitely glass-half-full at Viva, and we'll going to do our part in building a better future, ingredient by ingredient. Product by product.