Vervet Monkeys - The Least Concern Primates

Many countries have Endangered Species Acts that provide legal protection for threatened species. Trade in threatened species has been banned by countries that have signed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered species (CITES), providing them important protection.

The species is the unit of conservation (Groves, 2001; Mace, 2004). Therefore it is of great importance to define endangerment of these species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has defined categories of extinction risk and has defined criteria to classify species into these categories. The categories are extinct, extinct in the wild, critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable, near threatened, least concern and data deficient. The IUCN is the oldest and largest global environmental network and conservaing biodiversity is central to its mission along with climate change, sustainable energy, improving human well-being and building a greeen economy (www.iucn.org).

Within the IUCN is the IUCN Redlist of Threatened Species (www.iucnredlist.org). It uses a scientifically rigorous approach to determining extinction risk that is applicable to all species and has become a world standard. “The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is widely recognized as the most comprehensive, objective global approach for evaluating the conservation status of plant and animal species”. The IUCN Red List is an indicator of biodiversity threat. The species is the unit of conservation. Species are given places on national and international lists depending on their extinction risk and are thereby given a certain priority when it comes to policy makers and conservation planners and managers. The authorities on these species threat assessments are part of specialist groups within IUCN and decide what priority species are to be given. The Red List has great power and influence on guiding the conservation activities of governments, NGOs and scientific institutions.