Kristen Pickrell

The green sea turtle is no longer endangered. 🎉 In October 2025, the IUCN moved the green sea turtle from Endangered to Least Concern on the global Red List, skipping Vulnerable and Near Threatened entirely. It's one of the most dramatic uplistings the organization has ever recorded. The global population has grown by roughly 28 percent since the 1970s. Nesting beaches in Mexico, Hawaii, Brazil, and Florida are seeing numbers that haven't been recorded in living memory. Florida alone counted 77,000 green turtle nests in 2023. The recovery came from protections that were put in place decades ago and held: international bans on commercial hunting, Endangered Species Act protections in the US, beach monitoring programs, and fishing regulations requiring turtle excluder devices in nets. The work was slow and often invisible. Sea turtles take decades to reach sexual maturity, so the eggs protected on a beach in 1985 are the breeding adults we're counting in 2026. The results were always going to arrive a generation later than the effort. But keep this in mind: the global designation is good news, but the species is not saved everywhere, and the threats that drove the original decline, illegal egg harvesting, bycatch, beach development, and warming waters affecting nesting success, haven't disappeared. But after 40 years on the list, the green sea turtle is coming back.