African penguins face extinction within decade Here’s why

A devastating combination of climate-driven ocean changes and intensive fishing has pushed Africa’s only penguin species to the brink, with scientists warning the birds could vanish in as little as ten years unless urgent global action is taken.

A brutal convergence of environmental upheaval and unsustainable fishing has left tens of thousands of African penguins off South Africa’s coast without enough food to survive, causing a catastrophic 95-percent crash in adult numbers over just eight years, according to a new study, Science Alert says

“These declines are mirrored elsewhere,” says University of Exeter conservation biologist Richard Sherley, adding that the species has “undergone a global population decline of nearly 80 per cent in the last 30 years.”

African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) undergo a critical 20-day molting period each year, during which they must remain on land and cannot feed. Typically, they build up fat reserves beforehand—but between 2004 and 2011, stocks of their primary prey, Sardinops sagax sardines, plunged to only a quarter of their historic peak.

“If food is too hard to find before they molt or immediately afterwards, they will have insufficient reserves to survive the fast,” Sherley explains. “We don’t find large rafts of carcasses – our sense is that they probably die at sea.”

The collapse in sardine availability triggered mass starvation at two key breeding colonies, killing around 62,000 adult penguins during the study period. Research led by ecologist Robert Crawford of Cape Town’s Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment identifies shifts in ocean temperature and salinity—driven by human-caused climate change—as the primary factors behind the plummeting fish stocks. At the same time, commercial fishing pressures remained intense.

“Adult survival, principally through the crucial annual molt, was strongly related to prey availability,” says Sherley. “High sardine exploitation rates – that briefly reached 80 percent in 2006 – in a period when sardine was declining because of environmental changes likely worsened penguin mortality.”

The outlook has not improved. With fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs remaining in 2024, the African penguin is now classified as critically endangered.

Scientists warn that local conservation efforts can only achieve limited gains without broader systemic change.

“Fisheries management approaches that reduce the exploitation of sardine when its biomass is less than 25 percent of its maximum and allow more adults to survive to spawn, as well as those that reduce the mortality of recruits [juvenile sardines], could also help, although this is debated by some parties,” Sherley notes.

But without confronting the accelerating environmental changes reshaping the region’s oceans, researchers caution that restoring penguin populations will remain “difficult.” Current trends point toward the species’ extinction within a decade.

The crisis echoes a broader global pattern: wildlife populations have fallen by more than two-thirds since the 1970s, with climate-linked mortality events now affecting everything from river dolphins to coral reefs, eels, seabirds, and elephants. From plastics and pesticides to habitat loss and poaching, pressures on wildlife continue to intensify.

For years, scientists have stressed that reducing fossil-fuel use is essential to halt what they describe as a planetary-scale hemorrhage of life. Without decisive action, they warn, conservation efforts amount to little more than “a sticking plaster to patch up a broken arm.”

By Sabina Mammadli