Green Sea Turtle Swims Off the Endangered List After a 28% Global Rebound

For more than four decades, the green sea turtle carried the label of a species in trouble. Listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 1982, the ancient mariner had been battered by egg harvesting, hunting for its meat, coastal development and entanglement in fishing gear. In October 2025, at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi, that long chapter turned a hopeful page: the green turtle was reclassified from Endangered all the way to Least Concern.

The decision rests on hard data. Assessors found that the global population of the green turtle has climbed by roughly 28% since the 1970s, a recovery driven by nesting-beach protection, bans on egg and turtle harvesting, and reforms that reduce accidental capture in fisheries. It is one of the more dramatic turnarounds on the Red List, a document more often associated with grim news than with celebration.

“Listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 1982, the ancient mariner had been battered by egg harvesting, hunting for its meat, coastal development and entanglement in fishing gear.”

Scientists were careful to frame the milestone honestly. Brendan Godley of the University of Exeter said the change “underlines that marine conservation can work, there is hope, and we should rightly celebrate it,” while cautioning that green turtles remain a “conservation dependent” species that could slide backward if protections lapse. Roderic Mast, co-chair of the IUCN Marine Turtle Specialist Group, added that “sea turtles cannot survive without healthy oceans and coasts” and that sustained effort is key.

The recovery is also uneven. While the global assessment moved to Least Concern, several regional subpopulations remain fragile — the North Indian Ocean stock is still classed as Vulnerable and the Central South Pacific as Endangered, and even the North Atlantic population shows some signs of decline. In other words, the good news is a global average that masks places where the work is far from finished. Still, for a creature that has plied the world’s oceans for over a hundred million years, the message is unmistakable: given time, protection and cooperation across borders, even a deeply threatened species can find its way back.