60% of wildlife wiped out by human activity in 44 years

Unbridled consumption has decimated global wildlife, triggered a mass extinction and exhausted Earth's capacity to accommodate humanity's expanding appetites, the conservation group WWF warned Tuesday.

From 1970 to 2014, 60 percent of all animals with a backbone - fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals - were wiped out by human activity, according to WWF's "Living Planet" report, based on an ongoing survey of more than 4,000 species spread over 16,700 populations scattered across the globe.

"The situation is really bad, and it keeps getting worse," WWF International director general Marco Lambertini told AFP.

"The only good news is that we know exactly what is happening."

For freshwater fauna, the decline in population over the 44 years monitored was a staggering 80 percent. Regionally, Latin America was hit hardest, seeing a nearly 90 percent loss of wildlife over the same period: