The Value of the IUCN Red List for Business Decision-Making

By Leon Bennun, Eugenie C. Regan, Jeremy Bird, Jan-Willem van Bochove, Vineet Katariya, Suzanne Livingstone, Robin Mitchell, Conrad Savy, Malcolm Starkey, Helen Temple, John D. Pilgrim - The Biodiversity Consultancy, The Biodiversity Consultancy, The Biodiversity Consultancy, The Biodiversity Consultancy, The Biodiversity Consultancy, The Biodiversity Consultancy, The Biodiversity Consultancy, International Finance Corporation, The Biodiversity Consultancy, The Biodiversity Consultancy, The Biodiversity Consultancy

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The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species provides assessments of extinction
risk for over 80,000 species. It has become an important tool for conservation
and for informing natural resource policy and management more broadly.
Over the last 10–15 years, the role of the Red List in business decision-making
has become increasingly significant. We describe the key business uses of the
Red List and their benefits to conservation, focusing on industrial-scale development
and supply chains. The Red List is used by business throughout
the process of planning and implementing projects, in order to understand
and manage potential impacts on biodiversity. It informs screening and impact
avoidance, baseline survey design, impact assessment and mitigation, biodiversity
action plan development, and offset design and implementation. Business
use could be strengthened by recognizing business needs when prioritizing
improvements, so as to address specific aspects of consistency and coverage,
access, information relevance, and assessment transparency. Finding effective
ways to feed relevant business-generated data back into the Red List process
would, in turn, strengthen the assessments. The crucial role that the Red List
has assumed in good-practice business decision-making represents both a success
and an opportunity for the Red List community.