International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is a membership union composed of both government and civil society organisations.
IUCN has observer and consultative status at the United Nations.
As the first global environmental union, it brought together governments and civil society organisations with a shared goal to protect nature making itself the world’s largest and most diverse environmental network.
Aim: To encourage international cooperation and provide scientific knowledge and tools to guide conservation action.

The IUCN Red List is a critical indicator of the health of the world’s biodiversity.
It is a powerful tool to inform and catalyze action for biodiversity conservation and policy change, critical to protecting the natural resources we need to survive.
It provides information about range, population size, habitat and ecology, use and/or trade, threats, and conservation actions that will help inform necessary conservation decisions.
The IUCN Red List divides species into nine categories: Not Evaluated, Data Deficient, Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, Extinct in the Wild and Extinct.
Currently, there are more than 134,400 species on The IUCN Red List, with more than 37,400 species threatened with extinction, including 41% of amphibians, 34% of conifers, 33% of reef building corals, 26% of mammals and 14% of birds.

IUCN

IUCN Red List

Recently, the LIFE, an organization that works on environmental law, has asked IUCN to scrap the ‘least concern’ species category in assessment.
LIFE’s point about species of least concern and scrapping this category is valid, because it gives us a false sense of security.

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