Species → Komodo Dragon
Komodo Dragon
Varanus komodoensis
What if it disappeared?
Impact HighUnder the climate scenario judged most likely, a spatially explicit demographic model projects an 89% to 94% decline in the Komodo dragon's overall abundance by 2050 — but with sharp differences between islands: Komodo and Rinca, the two largest protected islands in the national park, are expected to persist under every scenario considered, unlike populations on smaller islands and on Flores.
DocumentedDetail
Jones, A.R., Jessop, T.S., Ariefiandy, A., Brook, B.W., Brown, S.C., Ciofi, C., Benu, Y.J., Purwandana, D., Sitorus, T., Wigley, T.M.L. et Fordham, D.A. (2020). Identifying island safe havens to prevent the extinction of the World's largest lizard from global warming. Ecology and Evolution, 10(19), 10492–10507.
The model combines decades of field monitoring with island-by-island projections of sea-level rise and temperature increase. Rising waters particularly threaten the low-lying valleys where the species' highest densities are concentrated today — a preferred habitat set to disappear first, even before the island as a whole becomes broadly uninhabitable.
Reclassified in 2021 from 'vulnerable' to 'endangered,' the Komodo dragon is a rare case of a species reclassified primarily because of climate projections rather than an already-measured field decline — up to 70% of its current habitat could become unsuitable by 2050 depending on the emissions scenario.
DocumentedDetail
UICN SSC Monitor Lizard Specialist Group (2021). Varanus komodoensis. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2021.
The assessment draws on both genetic data revealing a reduced effective population size and spatial modeling projections — an unusual combination of retrospective and forward-looking evidence to justify a threat-category change, since most reclassifications rest on an already-observed decline rather than a projected one.
As the sole large land predator on its islands, the Komodo dragon likely regulates the deer and boar populations it hunts — but no removal experiment or between-island comparison has measured what would actually happen to those prey, or to the vegetation they graze, in its absence.
InsufficientDocumentation
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IUCN Red List — Varanus komodoensis, réévaluation 2021
Accessed August 14, 2026
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Jones et al. (2020) — Identifying island safe havens to prevent the extinction of the World's largest lizard from global warming, Ecology and Evolution
Accessed August 14, 2026
Last verified: August 14, 2026