This year’s event comes at a critical time for wildlife and nature, and focuses on funding for conservation.
With report after report showing the alarming decline in animal and plant species, World Wildlife Day has never been more important. As the most prominent global annual event dedicated to wildlife, the day of global celebration and awareness of the plight of the world’s fauna and flora comes at a critical time for the world’s ecosystems, with shifting political and business environments conspiring against their survival.
This year, World Wildlife Day will be celebrated on March 3 under the theme of ‘Wildlife Conservation Finance: Investing in People and Planet’. The theme highlights the importance of investing in wildlife in financial terms as well as collective time and effort. Currently, finance for wildlife conservation has proven insufficient for governments to meet their national biodiversity targets, especially in low-to-middle-income countries where the world’s biodiversity hotspots are located1. While USD 143bn is currently invested annually in biodiversity conservation, this amount is significantly short of the estimated $824bn needed each year to protect and restore nature2.
Building on previous World Wildlife Days, World Wildlife Day 2025 will be a platform for exchanging ideas, showcasing solutions and pushing the debate of how innovative finance can contribute to halting biodiversity loss to create a sustainable future.
“We have a responsibility to unlock the power and agility of the finance sector and mainstream nature-positive considerations in the spheres of investment,” said Ivonne Higuero, Secretary-General of CITES, an organisation dedicated to the protection of animal species worldwide. “Wildlife conservation finance is about conserving plant and animal species in the wild and contributing to the conservation of our planet’s biodiversity that sustains all ecosystems and communities worldwide.”
A 74% drop in wildlife populations
The urgency of investing in wildlife to protect it from the devastating effects of agriculture, deforestation, wildfires and climate change is outlined in the latest Living Planet Report by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). Released in October 2024, the report has tracked almost 35,000 vertebrate populations of 5,495 species from 1970-2020, and found that there has been a catastrophic 73% decline in the average size of monitored wildlife populations in just 50 years.
The report picked out the decline in certain species to demonstrate the severity of the situation, such as a 57% decrease of nesting female hawksbill turtles between 1990 and 2018 on Milman Island in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, a 65% decrease of Amazon pink river dolphins, and an 88% decrease of Chinook salmon in the Sacramento River in California.
“Sharp declines in wildlife populations are a clear and urgent warning,” WWF Chief Scientist Rebecca Shaw. “These steep drops signal that nature is unravelling and becoming less resilient. When nature is compromised, it is more vulnerable to climate change and edges closer to dangerous and irreversible regional tipping points. When this happens in too many places around the globe, it threatens the very air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat.”
To find out more about World Wildlife Day, go to wwf.org.uk/world-wildlife-day
To download the latest Living Planet Report, go to livingplanet.panda.org
1 Puentes et al. (2020), The Little Book of Investing in Nature biofin.org/sites/default/files/content/knowledge_products/LBIN_2020_RGB_ENG.pdf
2 UNDP BIOFIN (2024), What is Biodiversity Finance? biofin.org/about-biofin/what-biodiversity-finance
