Harnessing biodiversity and conservation knowledge products to track the Aichi Targets and Sustainable Development Goals

For 50 years, the IUCN Commissions, Secretariat, Members such as BirdLife International and partners such as UNEP-WCMC have been mobilising biodiversity and conservation knowledge products, which are fundamentally important for tracking progress towards 10 of the 20 Aichi Targets, and should similarly become so for seven of the emerging 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Each of these knowledge products comprises standards, governance and quality control, data sets, tools, capacity building and ongoing processes for derivation of biodiversity indicators. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, established in 1964, documents extinction risk for more than 76,000 species. Protected Planet, working from the mandate to provide the UN List of Protected Areas, is convened jointly with UNEP and documents ~220,000 protected areas. The Red List of Ecosystems aims to assess the risk of collapse of ecosystems, and is currently being piloted in a number of countries. Key Biodiversity Areas are sites contributing si...