Top 100 Countries by Endangered Animal Species (IUCN Red List, 2025)
This page summarizes threatened animal species using the IUCN Red List framework. In plain terms: Vulnerable (VU), Endangered (EN), and Critically Endangered (CR) are the three “threatened” categories, with CR indicating the highest near-term extinction risk.
What is counted here (transparent proxy)
To ensure the tables render reliably inside WordPress/Elementor and stay current, the ranking is computed live from the World Bank WDI indicators derived from IUCN:
- Threatened mammals (count) + Threatened birds (count) → Threatened animals (proxy total)
- This is a conservative “two-taxa” view (vertebrates with broad assessment coverage).
If you later want the full “all assessed taxa” perspective (including amphibians, reptiles, fishes, invertebrates), it should be implemented via an IUCN dataset/workflow where country occurrence is computed from species ranges. Part 3 explains this limitation clearly.
Table 1 — Top 10 countries by threatened animal species (mammals + birds), latest available year (IUCN-based)
| Rank | Country | Threatened animals (mammals + birds) |
|---|---|---|
| — | Loading… | — |
“Latest available year” can differ by country and by series. The proxy total is computed as mammals + birds.
Chart 1 — Top 20 countries by threatened animal species (mammals + birds)
Values are integer counts from the official API. Rendering is rounded only by the data provider when applicable.
Analytics and context: what the split (mammals vs birds) can reveal
A single “threatened animals” number is useful for ranking, but the composition matters. Mammals and birds often respond differently to land-use change, hunting/poaching pressure, invasive species, and disease. Two countries can have the same total, yet very different risk profiles.
- High mammals, moderate birds can hint at fragmentation, hunting pressure, or large-mammal vulnerability.
- High birds, moderate mammals can point to island endemism, migratory pressures, or coastal/wetland stress.
- High on both often aligns with high biodiversity plus multi-factor pressure.
Table 2 — Top 20 snapshot: threatened mammals vs threatened birds (latest available year)
Three columns only (mobile-friendly): Country, Threatened mammals, Threatened birds.
| Country | Threatened mammals | Threatened birds |
|---|---|---|
| Loading… | — | — |
Values are country counts from IUCN-based World Bank WDI indicators (latest available observation by country; years can differ).
Chart 2 — Scatter: threatened mammals vs threatened birds
Each point is a country (latest available). A positive relationship is expected: places with many threatened mammals often also have many threatened birds. Outliers can be associated with habitat structure, island endemism, hunting pressure, or differences in monitoring.
The trend line is a simple least-squares fit for visual guidance (not causal evidence).
Table 3 — Full Top 100 (ranking by threatened animals proxy: mammals + birds)
One ranking column (total threatened, mammals + birds) to keep the table within the three-column requirement and mobile-readable.
| Rank | Country | Threatened (mammals + birds) |
|---|---|---|
| — | Loading… | — |
Ranking is computed from WDI (IUCN-based) series: EN.MAM.THRD.NO + EN.BIR.THRD.NO.
What this ranking means in practice
“Top threatened species counts” are best interpreted as priority pressure zones—places where a large share of biodiversity is exposed to risk. For policy and conservation planning, the value is not in naming “good” and “bad” countries, but in highlighting where protection, enforcement, restoration, and monitoring capacity can have the largest marginal effect.
For media and education, the ranking works as an “attention lens”: it can guide users toward understanding the dominant drivers of biodiversity loss (habitat conversion, fragmentation, exploitation, invasive species, pollution, climate stress), and why the same pressures can be far more damaging in countries with high endemism and narrow-range species.
- Prioritize habitat protection where richness is high—the same area protected can safeguard more unique species.
- Track pressure, not only counts: combine threatened counts with land-use change, fragmentation, and enforcement indicators to diagnose drivers.
- Invest in monitoring (surveys, national red lists, open biodiversity data): better data improves targeting and can reveal hidden risk.
- Island biosecurity is often “high ROI”: controlling invasive species can rapidly reduce extinction risk for endemic birds/mammals.
- This page uses an official WDI/IUCN-derived proxy: threatened mammals + threatened birds. It is not “all assessed taxa.”
- IUCN country totals on the Red List website can be computed from species occurrences/ranges across many taxonomic groups, including marine taxa.
- “Latest available year” may differ by country and series; revisions can occur as assessments are updated and harmonized.
- Cross-country comparisons are affected by assessment coverage and monitoring intensity (data bias).
Primary data sources and technical notes
These are the authoritative sources used to define threatened categories and to retrieve the country-level time series used in the page scripts. Links open in a new tab.
- IUCN Red List of Threatened Species — primary authority for VU/EN/CR categories and species assessment methodology.
- IUCN Red List: Categories & Criteria — technical definition of threat categories and the criteria behind them.
- World Bank — World Development Indicators (WDI) — official country indicator catalog used here for IUCN-based series.
- World Bank Indicators API (v2) — the machine-readable endpoint used by the page to load country values dynamically.
- World Bank WDI series used on this page — threatened mammals (EN.MAM.THRD.NO), threatened birds (EN.BIR.THRD.NO), mammal species (EN.MAM.SPEC.NO), bird species (EN.BIR.SPEC.NO).
Download: Top 100 Endangered Animal Species (IUCN-based, 2025) — Tables & Charts
ZIP includes CSV/XLSX tables and PNG chart images used in this article (Top 10/Top 20/Top 100 + bar & scatter).
If the download does not start, open the link in a new tab and refresh once.
