There is increasing demand for training from all regions of the world as countries step up efforts to assess their biodiversity and use the Red List as a basis for conservation action. SSC staff have held a series of successful workshops around the world on how to apply the criteria at a regional level and more are planned for the near future. The future There are currently about 1.8 million known species but the estimated number of species in the world is much higher. Faced with such a vast task, the IUCN Red List Programme has had to be selective in its assessments. However, the number of species being evaluated is already rapidly increasing.
Plans are underway to assess more amphibians, reptiles, freshwater fishes and marine species.
It is now a priority to use the current system to re-assess the 34,000 plant taxa listed, and work is progressing on many more groups of plant species. About SSC and IUCN SSC is the largest of the six volunteer commissions of IUCN - The World Conservation Union. It is a network of some 7,000 scientists, researchers and conservation practitioners working in almost every country in the world. SSC therefore has an immediate and established mechanism for distributing information about the critical conservation needs of species to those best positioned to act on that information. IUCN's mission is to influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable.