Medicinal Plant Conservation Status Assessment
and the IUCN Red List

What do we know about the global conservation status of medicinal plants?
About the IUCN Red List
Red List Authority for medicinal plants
Medicinal Plants on the IUCN Red List
Regional Red List Workshops and Activities

IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria. ver 3.1

IUCN. 2001. IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria: Version 3.1. IUCN Species Survival Commission. IUCN, Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, UK.

1. What do we know about the global conservation status of medicinal plants?

How many plants are used medicinally world-wide? The number of plant species which have at one time or another been used, and even the number in current use in some culture for medicinal purposes can only be estimated. An enumeration of the WHO from the late 1970s listed 21,000 medicinal species. However, in China alone 4,941 of 32,200 indigenous plant species are used as drugs in Chinese traditional medicine, an astonishing 15.3 percent. If this proportion is calculated for other well-known medicinal floras and then applied to the global total of 422,000 flowering plant species, it can be estimated that the number of plant species used for medicinal purposes is more than 70,000.

How many medicinal plant species are threatened? One of the goals of the IUCN Medicinal Plant Specialist Group is to identify the species that have become threatened by non-sustainable harvest and other factors. The enormity of this task is illustrated by the following estimate: 34,000 species out of 49,000 species assessed in the 1997 IUCN Red List of Threatened Plants were found to be globally threatened with extinction. A more recent assessment by David Bramwell estimates that 21% of the world's flora are threatened. If the latter figure is applied to our earlier extrapolation that 72,000 plant species are used medicinally, it leads us to estimate that about 15,000 MAP species are threatened at least to some degree.

Adapted with permission from:

Schippmann, U., D. Leaman, and A.B. Cunningham. 2006. Cultivation and wild collection of medicinal and aromatic plants under sustainability aspects. In: Bogers, R.J., L.E. Craker, and D. Lange (eds). Medicinal and aromatic plants. Springer, Dordrecht. Wageningen UR Frontis Series no. 17.

2. About the IUCN Red List

The IUCN Red List is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of plant and animal species. It uses a set of criteria to evaluate the extinction risk of thousands of species and subspecies. There are nine categories in the IUCN Red List system: Extinct, Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable, Near Threatened, Least Concern, Data Deficient, and Not Evaluated).

The overall aim of the Red List is to convey the urgency and scale of conservation problems to the public and policy makers, and to motivate the global community to try to reduce species extinctions. Information about species and ecosystems is essential for moving towards more sustainable use of our natural resources.

Learn more about the IUCN Red List

The IUCN website provides an explanation of IUCN Redlist Categories and Criteria

3. Red list authority for Medicinal Plants

The MPSG is the IUCN-designated Red List Authority for medicinal plants. The role of the Red List Authority is to ensure that all species within our jurisdiction are correctly evaluated against the IUCN Red List Categories. These evaluations should include recording all the necessary minimum documentation required and should be done in as consultative manner as is possible. We collaborate with other IUCN-SSC Specialist Groups where there is overlapping Red List authority (medicinally used orchids or palms, for example).

Please contact us for information and assistance if you are undertaking Red List assessment of medicinal plant species.

4. Medicinal Plants on the IUCN Red List

Many medicinal plant species have been assessed and included on local, regional, and national Red Lists. We are working with our network of members to assemble and share information about these assessments.

To date, there has not been a successful attempt to extract a global list of threatened medicinal plants from the Global Red List. The main constraint is the present lack of a means for searching Red List data according to use.

We do know, however, that many important and likely threatened medicinal plant species have not yet been assessed globally, and are therefore not included on the global IUCN Red List. The main constraints are the lack of sufficient field data to assign a threat category over the whole of their range, and the lack of knowledge and experience in using the Red List categories and criteria. We are working with our members to improve this situation.

5. Regional Red List Workshops and Activities

Our members regularly contribute to data gathering, management, and monitoring activities that identify threatened species of medicinal plants, as well as the nature of the threats to survival. We contribute to regional, national, and global Red Lists and other assessments of the conservation status of medicinal plant species and their habitats.

Medicinal Plant Red List Activities in South Asia:

Between 2000 and 2004, members of the MPSG in South Asia (especially D.K. Ved, Vinay Tandon, N.K. Bhattarai, and Madhav Karki) have led the organization and facilitation of six conservation assessment and management planning workshops for medicinal plants in the region, applying the IUCN Red List and CBSG CAMP processes. In India, these workshops are a central component of the project “In situ Conservation and Sustainable Utilization of Medicinal Plants”, a planning phase (PDF-B) for a Global Environment Facility (GEF) project administered by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). One application of this project is to identify priority medicinal plant species and habitat to be included in an existing network of Medicinal Plant Conservation Areas (MPCA’s) established by the state forest departments with community planning and management.

Nepal (January 2001) – 51 taxa assessed. Organized and supported by the Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Program in Asia (MAPPA), the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and the Ministry of Forest and Soil Conservation, Government of Nepal.
Maharastra State, India (February 2001) – 50 taxa assessed. Organized by the Medicinal Plants Conservation Center (MPCC), Pune, and the Foundation for Revitalization of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT), with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), Government of India.
Andhra Pradesh, India (March 2001) – 50 taxa assessed. Organized by FRLHT and MPCC, with support from UNDP and MoEF.
Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya and Sikkim, India (February/March 2003) – 51 taxa assessed. Organized by FRLHT, State Forest Research Institute (SFRI) of Arunachal Pradesh, Centre for Environmental Education (CEE) North East, with support from UNDP and MoEF.
Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal, India (May 2003) – 105 taxa assessed (approximately half of these reassessed using the revised IUCN Red List categories and criteria version 3.1). Organized by FRLHT, co-ordinated by the Himalayan Forest Research Insitute (HFRI), with support from UNDP and MoEF.
Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, India (July 2003) – 54 taxa assessed. Organized by FRLHT, co-ordinated by the Indian Institute of Forest Management, with support from UNDP and MoEF.

Medicinal Plant Red List Activities in Central America and the Caribbean:

In October 2001, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), through the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), awarded a grant to TRAMIL, a long-standing research programme on the safe and effective use of medicinal plants in traditional remedies throughout the Caribbean basin, to support a three-year Medium Size Project: “Biodiversity Conservation and Integration of Traditional Knowledge on Medicinal Plants in National Primary Health Care Policy in Central America and Caribbean”. The project was developed by enda-caribe, with technical assistance from the MPSG, and is coordinated by the MPSG Vice-Chair for Latin America, Dr Sonia Lagos-Witte. The MPSG is considered a co-funder with respect to ongoing in-kind contributions of technical assistance and training related to the identification of priority species and habitat for conservation and management based on local knowledge and scientific observation.

With support from the Conservation Breeding Specialist Group (CBSG) and the SSC Red List Programme, MPSG has contributed substantially to the organization and facilitation of two conservation assessment and Red List training workshops focused on priority medicinal plant species on the island of Hispañola (Dominican Republic, February 1994), and in the Central American countries Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras (Panama, March-April 2004). These workshops had the following outputs:

Training scientists in the region working with medicinal plants in the logic and application of the IUCN Red List categories and criteria, and the Conservation Assessment and Management Plan (CAMP) process developed by CBSG .
Compilation of relevant information for Red List assessments, based on survey results, and on the knowledge and experience of the participants.
Specific applications of the Red List criteria to evaluating threats to the island native plant diversity of Hispañola.
Assignment of IUCN Red List categories to the priority species selected for assessment (12 taxa native to the island of Hispañola (including the Dominican Republic and Haiti); 16 taxa native to Central America.
Identification of priority conservation and resource management activities, including a time frame and key partnerships.