World's Biggest Market Crashes and You Didn't Even Know It

If animals were stocks, the market would be crashing.

The chart below shows the performance of an index that tracks global animal populations over time, much like the S&P 500 tracks shares of the biggest U.S. companies.  The Global Living Planet Index, updated today by the World Wildlife Foundation, tracks representative populations of 3,038 species of reptiles, birds, mammals, amphibians and fish.

To say the index of animals is underperforming humans is an understatement.  More than half of the world's vertebrates have disappeared between 1970 and 2010.  (In the same period, the human population nearly doubled.)  The chart starts at 1, which represents the planet's level of vertebrate life as of 1970.
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The report reads like one of the "alarm bells" U.S. President Barack Obama referenced in his climate change speech last week.  Unfortunately, according to the WWF, the effects of climate change are only starting to be felt; most of the degradation of the past four decades has other causes.  The biggest drivers are exploitation (think overfishing) responsible for 37 percent of animal population decline, habitat degradation at 31 percent, and habitat loss at 13 percent.

Global warming is responsible for 7.1 percent of the current declines in animal populations, primarily among climate-sensitive species such as tropical amphibians.  Latin American biodiversity dropped 83 percent, the most of any region.  But the toll from climate change is on the rise, the WWF says, and the other threats to animal populations aren't relenting.

World's Biggest Market Crashes and You Didn't Even Know It