Here’s Some Exciting News About Green Sea Turtles!

It’s time to celebrate some welcome news about green sea turtles! As Euro News reports, these formally-endangered aquatic reptiles, living in tropical and subtropical oceans worldwide, have been reclassified as being a “species of least concern” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in its influential conservation index. This conservation category contains abundant, well-distributed species that face no real danger of extinction. Doing so, it also leapfrogged the “vulnerable” and “near threatened” classifications. This is all thanks to extensive conservation efforts. 

In mid-October 2025, at the IUCN Congress in Abu Dhabi, it was announced that the worldwide population of green sea turtles, aka Chelonia mydas, had grown by approximately 28 percent since the 1970s. 

News of their recovery, after decades of decline, has been greeted with excitement by conservationists: “This is a major win for turtle conservation and proof that coordinated action [with conservationists and local communities] can reverse populations at risk of extinction,” says Christine Madden, WWF Global Marine Turtle Conservation Lead in a WWF article on the population rebound.

Brendan Godley, a turtle expert from the UK’s University of Exeter tells Mongabay that “It underlines that marine conservation can work, there is hope, and we should rightly celebrate it, sharing some ocean optimism.”

This reclassification follows a detailed assessment of the status quo of green sea turtle populations worldwide.  As Godley points out, this Red List Assessment of such a globally distributed species, an immense and challenging job, was made possible by the commitment of teams working on turtle and marine conservation across the globe and deserves our respect.

From Abundance to Depletion to the Positive Outcome of Conservation Efforts 
Green sea turtles are slow to reproduce, with adults only reaching sexual maturity at an estimated 26 to 40 years of age. In addition, just one percent of hatchlings survive long enough to reproduce themselves. Despite this challenge, green sea turtles, details the Smithsonian Magazine, were once so abundant that during the time of Christopher Columbus, sailors could navigate at night around islands by the sounds of turtles breathing and their hard shells bumping into the wooden hulls of their boats. 

According to Earth.org green sea turtles, the second largest of seven sea turtle species, have an astonishingly wide geographical distribution, nesting in over 80 countries and inhabiting the temperate, tropical coastal waters of around 140 countries.

A severe depletion came about, however,  because historically, humans hunted green turtles for their shells, meat and eggs. Their meat was sought out to make soup and other culinary delicacies, while their eggs and shells were decorated by many cultures, decimating their populations. 

Even after hunting declined, the species continued to be threatened due to entanglement in fishing nets, the degradation of nesting beaches and ocean habitats, the impacts of invasive species, and factors taking in pollution, diseases and climate change. 

Dive Magazine indicates that the Chelonia Mydas population declined in numbers by between 48 to 67 percent over the last 200 years.

More recently, for over 40 years, the global population of green sea turtles was classified as endangered after numbers dropped to concerning levels in the 1980s. 

This exciting rebound is credited to turtle conservation endeavors focused on safeguarding nesting females and their eggs on beaches, reducing the unsustainable harvest of turtles and their eggs for human consumption, and addressing the accidental capture of turtles in fishing gear, despite ongoing other threats such as climate change.

Going Forward, Green Turtles Should be Viewed as ‘Conservation-Dependent’
Despite this positive reclassification and the sidestepping of an imminent risk of extinction, green sea turtles remain “significantly depleted,” with three of the 11 populations of green turtles still in decline, and so conservation efforts need to be sustained.

Specifically, the latest assessment warns that regional research shows that several subpopulations are still threatened or declining. For instance, those in the North Indian Ocean are listed as vulnerable, while those in the Central South Pacific are classified as endangered. Other trends are also cause for concern. After some years of a noted population increase in Costa Rica, for instance, lowered nesting numbers have been noted more recently.

The WWF’s Madden, quoted above, warns that this is not the time for complacency: “Conservation efforts must continue for green turtle populations to thrive and recover in areas where they remain threatened by fishing gear entanglement, overfishing and loss of habitats.”

In an article on this reclassification of green sea turtles, the WWF encourages the use of innovative DNA-led tools such as Shellbank and Blue Corridors for Turtles to better track their populations and identify those most at risk. This can be especially valuable along migratory pathways in the high seas, and the oceanic habitats where these marine reptiles spend the majority of their lives.

Roderic Mast of IUCN similarly cautions that sea turtles can’t survive without healthy oceans and coasts, so sustained conservation efforts are key to assuring that this recovery lasts.

Turtle expert Godley pinpoints an ideal way forward to Mongabay: “Many sea turtle conservation scientists have suggested that [green turtles] might best be considered as part of a group of ‘Conservation Dependent’ species in that, if they were not subject to any conservation, they might quickly decline.“This is, in part, evidenced by the fact that they have not increased uniformly across the global ocean,” he adds.

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