What is a national red list?

A national red list is a country-level extinction-risk assessment that applies the same IUCN methodology to a single country's populations. It can — and frequently does — produce a different category than the global Red List because a species widespread globally may be functionally extirpated nationally.

Why would a species be Critically Endangered in one country but Least Concern globally?

The global IUCN rating is a population-wide average across the species' entire range. A species can be common in one continent and on the brink in another country where it occupies the edge of its range or where local pressures (hunting, habitat conversion) have driven it down. SpeciesRadar's database shows 81 cases of this divergence today.

Which country has the most "globally safe, locally critical" species in SpeciesRadar?

Nepal carries 81 species classified as Critically Endangered or Endangered nationally but Least Concern, Near Threatened or Data Deficient globally — the highest count of any country with national red list data in our database. The full set is on /countries/NP.

National vs Global: Why Local Threat Assessments Matter

The blind spot in the global Red List

The IUCN Red List is the definitive global extinction-risk assessment for threatened species, but it operates at a population-wide scale. A species with a wide range can be classified Least Concern globally even if it is functionally extirpated in one or more countries — the rest of the range carries the average. For conservation policy, that average is the wrong unit of analysis: extinction risk is what determines protection budgets, and protection budgets are decided nationally.

What a national red list adds

A national red list applies the same five IUCN quantitative criteria to a country's populations only. The result is a category that reflects local reality — which is often markedly worse than the global rating suggests. SpeciesRadar's database currently holds 1,291 cross-referenced assessments where both a global and a national rating exist for the same species, and 81 of those national ratings flag the species as more threatened locally than the global Red List does.

Nepal as a case study

Of the countries currently in our national red list ingest, Nepal carries the highest count of "globally safe, locally critical" species at 81. These are species the global IUCN Red List rates as Least Concern, Near Threatened or Data Deficient — but which the national assessment classifies as Critically Endangered or Endangered. For a Nepali forest department setting next year's conservation budget, the local rating is the operative number; the global one is a distraction.

How SpeciesRadar surfaces the gap

Every species and country dashboard on SpeciesRadar shows both ratings side-by-side where the national data exists. The divergence column is filterable, sortable, and explorable per taxonomic group. The methodology for cross-referencing each assessment — and the source citations for each national list — is documented at /methodology.

Why this is uncopyable

Global Red List data is publicly downloadable; national red lists are not. They live in PDF reports, ministry archives, and national herbaria — each in a different format, language, and taxonomic schema. Consolidating them into one cross-referenced dataset is what makes SpeciesRadar's analytical layer hard to replicate. The dashboard you reach via the spoke posts below is built on top of that consolidation.

Data sourced from SpeciesRadar (speciesradar.org), drawing on IUCN Red List 2025-2, GBIF, and national red list assessments from 200+ countries. See our Methodology for how each figure is computed.