The drivers

Why extinction is happening

Extinction in our era is not bad luck or destiny. It is the predictable result of a small number of human choices — and the single largest is how we use land to produce food, above all to raise farmed animals.

The shape of the crisis

In 2019 the world's governments adopted the findings of IPBES, the global science panel on biodiversity: around one million species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades.⁵ WWF and the Zoological Society of London's Living Planet Report 2024 found that monitored populations of wild vertebrates have shrunk by an average of 73% since 1970 — and by 95% in Latin America and the Caribbean.⁷

The scale is easiest to grasp by weight. Put every mammal on Earth on a scale and wild mammals — every elephant, whale, mouse and bat — make up only about 4% of the total. The rest is us and the animals we farm: livestock alone outweighs all wild mammals by more than ten to one.⁸

IPBES ranks five drivers of this loss. On land, in order of impact, they are: (1) changes in how we use land and sea, (2) direct exploitation of wild species, (3) climate change, (4) pollution and (5) invasive species.⁵ The first is by far the biggest — and it is mostly about food.

The biggest driver is land — and the biggest use of land is food

Roughly half of the planet's habitable land is already farmed.² When forests fall, agriculture is almost always the reason: the UN Food and Agriculture Organization attributes almost 90% of global deforestation to agricultural expansion, with cropland responsible for more than half and livestock grazing for nearly 40%.¹ A major 2021 review for Chatham House and the UN Environment Programme found that agriculture threatens 24,000 of the 28,000 species assessed as at risk of extinction — making the global food system the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss.⁶

Front and centre: industrialised animal agriculture

Not all food weighs on nature equally. The largest meta-analysis of farming ever assembled, by Poore and Nemecek in Science, found that livestock uses 77% of the world's agricultural land but supplies only 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein.² Feeding people through animals is inefficient: most of what a cow, pig or chicken eats is spent staying alive, not building meat. So vast areas are cleared to produce a relatively small amount of food — and that land has to come from somewhere.

Increasingly it comes from forests. Pasture for cattle is the single largest driver of deforestation on Earth: it accounts for around 41% of all tropical forest loss, with Brazilian beef alone responsible for roughly a quarter, and within Brazil cattle ranching drives about 72% of deforestation.⁴ Across South America as a whole, the FAO finds that almost three-quarters of forest loss is for livestock grazing.¹ Forest that took millennia to grow — sheltering many of the animals in this census — is turned to pasture in a single season.

The soy connection — what's actually true

Soy is the crop most often blamed for "feeding cows for beef," and the headline number is real: about 77% of the world's soy is grown to feed farmed animals, while just 7% is eaten directly by people as tofu, soy milk and the like.³ But the precise picture matters, so here it is: most soy feed goes to chickens (around 37% of all soy) and pigs (around 20%); farmed fish take about 6%, and cattle only about 2%.³

So beef's biggest footprint is pasture, not soy — but the two are tightly linked. As soy fields spread, they push cattle ranchers deeper into the forest frontier, and the clearing has shifted from the Amazon into Brazil's less-protected Cerrado savanna, now the epicentre of soy-driven habitat loss.³ Most of that soy is exported to fatten animals in Europe and China.³ The shorthand "soy is destroying forests to feed livestock" is broadly true; the honest version is that industrial animal farming drives forest loss through both pasture and feed — beef clearing land directly, and the chicken-and-pig feed chain pulling in the same direction.

The scientific verdict on animal farming

Step back from any single forest, and the pattern in the peer-reviewed literature is blunt. Livestock production is, in the words of a major review in Science of the Total Environment, the single largest driver of habitat loss on the planet.⁹ And because lost habitat is the leading reason species vanish, a 2020 study went further, titling its finding plainly: human meat-eating is now a major driver of vertebrate extinction — not only by clearing land, but through the agrochemicals, nutrients, antibiotics and hormones livestock sends into rivers, and from there into seagrass meadows and coral reefs. By that study's reckoning, farmed animals draw an estimated 43% of all the water used by the global food system.¹⁰

The size of the effect is what stops you. Inside Key Biodiversity Areas — the places that matter most for life on Earth — eating animal products drives more than half of all the biodiversity loss recorded there, and beef alone is the single biggest contributor, at around 31%.¹¹ A 2025 study in Nature Food put a figure on the choice at the plate: by weight, ruminant meat carries roughly 340 times the extinction cost of grains, and about 100 times that of plant proteins like beans and soy. Its authors are unequivocal — "agriculture is and will continue to cause greater harm to biodiversity than any other sector."¹² In Europe, where the accounting is most complete, livestock is reckoned to cause 78% of farming's damage to land-based biodiversity.¹³

And there is no grazing our way out of it. When Project Drawdown weighed the popular fixes, it rated expanding pasture and switching to grass-fed beef "Not Recommended," and even rotational or reduced-intensity grazing only "Keep Watching" — because that same land does far more for the climate, and for wildlife, left as forest than turned over to cattle.¹⁴

The other drivers — and the animals on this site

Land-use change is the largest force, but it rarely acts alone. The animals profiled here are being lost to the full set of IPBES drivers: direct exploitation — the wire snares emptying Malaysia's forests of tigers, the gillnets drowning the last vaquitas, the trade in pangolin scales; climate change — warming that lets malarial mosquitoes climb into the ʻakikiki's last high forests; pollution — the veterinary drug diclofenac that erased more than 99% of South Asia's vultures; and invasive species and disease — the chytrid fungus that has driven amphibians like the Panamanian golden frog to the brink.

What actually reverses it

The same evidence points to the way back. Protect and restore habitat; shift demand away from the most land-hungry foods — beef and dairy above all — so that less forest needs to be cleared; and hold supply chains to deforestation-free standards.⁶ None of this is hypothetical. The recoveries documented across this site — the kākāpō, the California condor, the black-footed ferret, the mountain gorilla — prove that when the pressure lifts, even species reduced to a handful of individuals can climb back.

References

Every figure above is drawn from the sources below and was checked against the original publications in 2026-06-19. Where a popular claim is simplified, we have used the more precise version the data supports.

1. UN Food and Agriculture Organization (2021). COP26: Agricultural expansion drives almost 90 percent of global deforestation. fao.org
2. Poore, J. & Nemecek, T. (2018). Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science 360, 987–992. doi.org/10.1126/science.aaq0216 — summarised by Our World in Data, Environmental impacts of food.
3. Ritchie, H. (2021). Soy. Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org/soy
4. Ritchie, H. & Roser, M. — Drivers of deforestation. Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation; WWF — Unsustainable cattle ranching. wwf.panda.org; Yale Environment 360 — Controlling the Ranching Boom That Threatens the Amazon. e360.yale.edu
5. IPBES (2019). Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. ipbes.net; UN News summary, news.un.org
6. Benton, T.G., Bieg, C., Harwatt, H., Pudasaini, R. & Wellesley, L. (2021). Food system impacts on biodiversity loss. Chatham House, UNEP & Compassion in World Farming. unep.org
7. WWF & Zoological Society of London (2024). Living Planet Report 2024: A System in Peril. worldwildlife.org
8. Bar-On, Y.M., Phillips, R. & Milo, R. (2018). The biomass distribution on Earth. PNAS 115, 6506–6511. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1711842115
9. Machovina, B., Feeley, K.J. & Ripple, W.J. (2015). Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption. Science of the Total Environment 536, 419–431. doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.07.022. The decline of wild predators and grazers it describes is documented by Ripple et al. (2014), Science, doi.org/10.1126/science.1241484, and Ripple et al. (2015), Science Advances, doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1400103.
10. Coimbra, Z.H., Gomes-Jr, L. & Fernandez, F.A.S. (2020). Human carnivory as a major driver of vertebrate extinction. Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation 18(4), 283–293. doi.org/10.1016/j.pecon.2020.10.002. The review draws together FAO's Livestock's Long Shadow (Steinfeld et al., 2006), fao.org; FAO (2018), Nutrient flows and associated environmental impacts in livestock supply chains, fao.org; the water estimate of Davis et al. (2016), Global Environmental Change, doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2016.05.004; marine-pollution reviews by Islam & Tanaka (2004), doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2003.12.004, Camargo & Alonso (2006), doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2006.05.002, and Diaz & Rosenberg (2008), doi.org/10.1126/science.1156401; and, on habitat loss as the leading driver of decline, Vié et al. (2009), IUCN, iucn.org, and Ducatez & Shine (2017), Conservation Letters, doi.org/10.1111/conl.12258.
11. Sun, Z., Behrens, P., Tukker, A., Bruckner, M. & Scherer, L. (2022). Global human consumption threatens Key Biodiversity Areas. Environmental Science & Technology 56(13), 9003–9014. doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.2c00506.
12. Ball, T.S. et al. (2025). Food impacts on species extinction risks can vary by three orders of magnitude. Nature Food 6, 848–856. doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01224-w. The ~340× (vs grains) and ~100× (vs plant proteins) figures are weighted global medians by mass; per gram of protein, ruminant meat's median extinction cost remains roughly 100× that of legumes and pulses.
13. Leip, A., Billen, G., Garnier, J., Grizzetti, B., Lassaletta, L., Reis, S., Simpson, D., Sutton, M.A., de Vries, W. & Weiss, F. (2015). Impacts of European livestock production. Environmental Research Letters 10(11), 115004. doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/10/11/115004. Figures are livestock's share of European agriculture's impact: 78% of terrestrial biodiversity loss, 80% of acidification and air pollution, 81% of the global-warming contribution, and 73% of water pollution.
14. Project Drawdown — grazing solution assessments: Expand Livestock Grazing (Not Recommended), drawdown.org; Deploy Grass-Finished Beef (Not Recommended), drawdown.org; Deploy Alternative Grazing (Keep Watching), drawdown.org; Reduce Grazing Intensity (Keep Watching), drawdown.org.