National Red List Indexes: why do we need to produce them and how should we go about it

Red List assessments are an essential source of information for monitoring the status of species and for informing conservation. The Red List Index (RLI) is a metric derived from Red Lists to indicate trends in the status of biodiversity, using changes to species’ extinction risk categories. The Global Biodiversity Framework currently being negotiated by parties to the Convention on Biological diversity is including the Red List Index as a headline indicator to monitor the species component of Goal A which aims to halt species extinction and reduce species overall risk of extinction. The RLI is also used to assess progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15 (Life on Land), in several other policy fora (including the Convention to Combat Desertification, Convention on Migratory Species and the Ramsar Convention), and in global assessments of the status of nature.

In this webinar we explore the National Red List Indexes: why do we need to produce them and how should we go about it, where we will explain how to produce a Red List Index for a country in order to monitor change of species status over time. The nations have two ways to produce RLIs, which, respectively, track their country’s contributions towards reducing global and national extinction risk. The first method uses existing IUCN Red List assessments for global extinction risk of each species, and adjusts each species’ contribution to a national index. A second option is to assess national extinction risk for the proportion of species’ populations occurring within their boundaries by applying the Guidelines for Application of the IUCN Criteria at Regional and National Levels and repeating these assessments for selected taxonomic groups. Explaining how these two approaches are more or less appropriate for different nations depending on their levels of species endemism will be explained. This presentation will be led by Domitilla Raimondo (South Africa), Threatened Species Programme Manager at the South African National Biodiversity Institute and moderated by Jon Paul Rodriguez, IUCN Species Survival Commission Chair.