The use of wild animals and plants is essential to human livelihoods and wellbeing, and as the world’s population increases, our use is having a greater and greater impact on both the species being targeted and the ecosystems in which they live. Indicators of sustainable use are essential tools in being able to assess how well we are balancing the conservation of wild species and ecosystems with the needs of people, and to be able incorporate this information into policy and decision making processes. The Wild Commodities Index will be the first sustainable use indicator to include wild terrestrial, freshwater and marine animals and plants, and will use population, harvest and market price data to track how sustainably a selection of species are being used.

The indicator is newly developed for the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership and has been in development since October 2007. Data collection is ongoing. The indicator tracks changes in the sustainability of use of a selection, or ‘basket’ of wild animals and plants. There are three components to this indicator. The primary indicator is an indicator that tracks changes in the size of populations of these species since 1970. This analysis is based on the Living Planet Index (WWF/ZSL) and the index will compare population trends in the vertebrate species in the ‘basket’ versus non-utilised vertebrates. The remaining two indicators are newly developed and are currently being piloted using data collected from a selection of the species in the ‘basket’. The second index will track changes in how sustainable the harvest of these species has been over time. This ‘harvest indicator’ will be carried out for marine fish species and a limited number of terrestrial species. The third and final element of the index is a price based index which will track changes in the price of the wild commodities from the species in the basket versus other commodities such as agricultural crops and non-food commodities like oil.

The data for this global indicator consists of national and population level measures, and can therefore potentially be disaggregated to look at trends at national and regional scales.

Global Living Planet Indexfor Utilized Species
Source: WWF and ZSL

Population indicator: A decrease in the index means that the general trend in the size of the populations within it has decreased since the baseline year of 1970.

Harvest indicator: This index tracks sustainability using ratio between the real harvest and the ‘optimal’ level of harvest for all of the populations within it. Therefore, an increase in the index means that the harvests are less sustainable than those taken during the previous year. If the index decreases, the ratio between these two variables is lower so more of the harvests are sustainable.

Price indicator: An increase in the index means that the price of the wild commodities has increased more during the previous year than the price of the baseline commodities (e.g. non-food commodities). Conversely, if the index decreases, then the price of the baseline commodities have increased proportionally more than the wild commodities.

The future development of this indicator will focus on expanding in the economic and harvest elements of the Index. By broadening the dataset to include factors such as resource tenure and enforcement and adding extra layers of information such as the vulnerability of species to climate change, we will be able to paint a much more comprehensive picture of how, what and where species are being used.

As this indicator has been in development, there aren’t yet any publications solely about the indicator. However, the indicator is outlined together with other species-based indicators (such as the Red List of Threatened Species and the Living Planet Index) in a factsheet within The Review of the 2008 Red List of Threatened Species. This publication was prepared to accompany the release of the 2008 Red List at the IUCN Congress in Barcelona in October 2008.