Hui Xiao, Amanda Driver, Andrés Etter, David Keith, Carl Obst, Michael J Traurig, Emily Nicholson

Safeguarding biodiversity and human well-being depends on sustaining ecosystems. Global agreements, such as the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework and UN Sustainable Development Goals, aim to halt and reverse loss and degradation of ecosystems, associated biodiversity and ecosystem services. They require standardised information for quantifying where ecosystem loss and degradation is occurring, and where action can most effectively mitigate its impacts. Two global standards developed to quantify ecosystem changes are: 1) the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) protocol for assessing the risk of ecosystem collapse; and 2) the United Nations System for Environmental Economic Accounting Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA), which tracks change in ecosystem assets and their contributions to the economy and human well-being. In this paper, we explore the similarities between the frameworks, identifying common concepts, models and data, and highlight differences in their conceptual framings and practical implementation that make them complementary in environmental policy and decision-making. We illustrate how information on ecosystem classifications, maps, extent and condition can be shared between RLE assessments and SEEA EA, through three case studies: South Africa, Colombia, and Meso-American Coral Reef. Key differences include the RLE’s focus on ecosystem dynamics and risk of collapse, consideration of future projections, and its explicit treatment of uncertainty. We recommend that ecosystem risk assessment and accounting should not be treated as unrelated processes nor undertaken in isolation of each other, or they risk producing outputs, in particular ecosystem classifications, maps and condition indicators, that are needlessly inconsistent or even contradictory. Finding pathways for sharing data and knowledge between frameworks, purposes and user-groups, as well as their complementary roles in environmental reporting and policy, will support more efficient and effective action to safeguard biodiversity, ecosystems and their contributions to people.