International Union for Conservation of Nature

IUCN Full Form in English, letter by letter

IUCN stands for International Union for Conservation of Nature, the global body that publishes the Red List of Threatened Species.

IUCN Full Form in Indian Languages

IUCN writes the list that decides whether a species counts as endangered. Here is International Union for Conservation of Nature in six Indian languages.

The full form, founding and what kind of body it is

IUCN full form is International Union for Conservation of Nature. It was founded on 5 October 1948 in Fontainebleau, France, and for part of its history it carried the longer name International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. It is also known as the World Conservation Union.

Its headquarters are in Gland, Switzerland. It is funded by member subscriptions, project funding and donations.

IUCN is not a United Nations agency. It is an independent membership union of governments, government agencies and NGOs, with more than 1,400 members, that works alongside the UN and advises environmental agreements.

The word union in the name is literal: members include sovereign states, state agencies and large international and national NGOs, each with voting rights at the World Conservation Congress, which meets about every four years. Decisions there, such as motions on protecting particular habitats, are often reported in the news as if IUCN were a government body.

The Red List, the reason most people know IUCN

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species has been published since 1964 and is the most cited inventory of species status. It uses fixed categories: Extinct, Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable, Near Threatened, Least Concern, Data Deficient and Not Evaluated. The three categories Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable together are called threatened.

The thresholds are concrete. Under one of the decline tests, a species is Critically Endangered if its population has fallen by at least 80% over ten years or three generations (whichever is longer), Endangered at 50% and Vulnerable at 30%. Other tests look at range size, fragmentation and the number of mature individuals.

More than 150,000 species have been assessed, and over 40,000 of them are listed as threatened with extinction. The exact numbers change with each update, so read the figure on the Red List website for the date you need. Each assessment is done by specialists and reviewed before publication.

The Red List is updated several times a year, and it also tracks species that have recovered. A species can move to a lower category when conservation works, and such moves are as important for the record as the new additions of threatened species.

What else the organisation does

Protected area standards

IUCN defines the global categories for protected areas, from strict nature reserves to areas for sustainable use, numbered Ia to VI, and runs the Green List, a standard that judges how well a protected area is actually managed.

Commissions and science

Thousands of volunteer experts work through its commissions, including the Species Survival Commission and the World Commission on Protected Areas, producing assessments that feed into national wildlife laws and international agreements such as CITES.

Policy advice

IUCN publishes guidelines on climate adaptation, ecosystem restoration and conservation finance, and its projects run with governments and local partners across Africa, Asia and other regions.

IUCN status and India

Indian species appear on the Red List in large numbers. The Great Indian Bustard is Critically Endangered, the Asiatic lion and the Ganges river dolphin are Endangered, the red panda is Endangered and the snow leopard is Vulnerable. Check the Red List for the latest status, since categories are reassessed.

These listings are not legal protection by themselves. Legal protection in India comes from the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 and its schedules, which the government amends after taking advice from its own bodies and experts.

The Indian government and state forest departments are members, and Indian scientists sit on the specialist groups that write the assessments.

Common mix-ups: IUCN, CITES, UNEP and WWF

IUCN assesses risk, and it does not regulate anything. CITES is a separate treaty that restricts international trade in listed species through Appendices I, II and III. Its listings often draw on Red List findings.

UNEP is a United Nations programme with a different mandate, while WWF is a conservation NGO best known for its panda logo, and it is often mistaken for IUCN in news reports.

Read a headline carefully. A species being Endangered on the IUCN Red List tells you its extinction risk, and does not mean hunting has been banned or that funding follows automatically.

IUCN also advises UNESCO on natural World Heritage Sites, which is another reason it appears in news about forests, reefs and wetlands. When a headline says a site is on the World Heritage list, the decision belongs to UNESCO's World Heritage Committee, and IUCN's evaluation is advice to it.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature supplies the science that the conservation world argues over, above all the Red List with its clearly defined categories. When a news report calls a species endangered, that list is usually the source, so the thresholds are worth knowing.

IUCN Full Form: Common Questions