Emperor penguins are native to Antarctica, where record low sea ice over the last decade has dramatically changed their habitat. Populations of the world’s largest penguin have fallen so much that they have now officially moved from near threatened to endangered in the latest assessment by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the global conservation authority, published April 9.
“Penguins are already among the most threatened birds on Earth,” Martin Harper, CEO of BirdLife International, which coordinated the emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) assessment for the IUCN Red List, wrote in a statement. “The emperor penguin’s move to Endangered is a stark warning: climate change is accelerating the extinction crisis before our eyes. Governments must act now to urgently decarbonise our economies.”
In 2022, researchers found that four out of five emperor penguin colonies in western Antarctica’s Bellingshausen Sea had died due to a lack of sea ice. In 2019, satellite images found that at Halley Bay, farther North, the colony failed to reproduce for three years in a row. The sea ice broke up before penguin chicks grew their waterproof feathers or learned to swim. They all died before fledging.
“It’s very hard to think of these cute fluffy chicks dying in large numbers,” Peter Fretwell, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey, told The Guardian in 2023 following the Bellingshausen colony losses. “The sea ice loss has been unprecedented and far quicker than we imagined.”
Between 2009 and 2018, satellite images of 50 colonies across all of Antarctica indicated that 9.6% of the population, around 24,000 mature penguins, would have died due to habitat loss, according to a 2024 study.
Penguins are especially dependent on “fast ice,” expanses of frozen ocean ice that are fastened to the coast. In 2026, scientists discovered new emperor penguin molting sites where penguins go to shed old feathers. But satellite imagery shows the sites seem to be melting beneath the birds’ feet, potentially forcing the penguins back to sea before their protective feathers regrew.
The IUCN projects that emperor penguin populations are set to fall by 50% within the next 50 years as Antarctic sea ice continues to melt.
“Emperor penguins are a sentinel species that tell us about our changing world and how well we are controlling greenhouse gas emissions that lead to climate change,” wrote Philip Trathan, a member of the IUCN SSC Penguin Specialist Group who worked on the emperor penguin Red List assessment.
“After careful consideration of different possible threats, we concluded that human-induced climate change poses the most significant threat to emperor penguins,” he added.
Competition for krill is another threat to penguin abundance, as large vessels are fishing krill at record rates, scientists recently alerted, mostly to use as aquaculture feed.
Banner image: Emperor penguin chicks on Antarctica’s Rothschild Island. Image courtesy of Philip Trathan.
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