The Living Planet Index
The Living Planet Index (LPI) is a measure of the state of the world’s biological diversity based on population trends of vertebrate species from around the world.
The LPI has been adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as an indicator of progress towards its 2011-2020 target to ‘take effective and urgent action to halt the loss of biodiversity'. It also played a pivotal role in measuring progress towards the CBD's 2010 target.
ZSL and WWF are developing rigorous and robust methods for aggregating species population trends to produce indices of the state of biodiversity, expanding the coverage of LPI data to more broadly represent vertebrate biodiversity from all around the globe, and disaggregating the index to measure trends in different thematic areas. This includes assessing the changes in different taxonomic groups, looking at species trends at a national or regional level, and identifying differences in decline trajectories under various threat processes.
Living Planet Index fact sheet Informing policy
The results of the LPI can be utilized to measure progress towards biodiversity targets and inform policy makers at the highest level.
Global trends in biodiversity
The Living Planet Index is a global index which can be used to assess vertebrate population trends against a variety of parameters and can be applied over multiple scales.
Calculating the index
The global coverage of the Living Planet Index and how the method has been developed.
Future directions
Expanding the data coverage of the LPI and launching an online database.
Global Living Planet Index
The global Living Planet Index is an indicator of trends in biodiversity over the past 38 years based on population data from over 2700 species.
The results reveal the disparate trends in abundance from temperate and tropical regions and an overall decline of 28% in global vertebrate populations.
Communicating trends
Reaching a wide audience including policy makers, conservationists and the public is a vital part of this project.
Targeted applications
The LPI method can be targeted to species within a specific area or functional group. This approach may be useful for assessing trends at a more local level.
Example population trends
The building blocks of the LPI – some examples of different population trends from around the world.
