During the development of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a global call was made for biodiversity conservation and management interventions to be informed by comprehensive ecosystem assessments. In response to this mandate, several ecosystem headline indicators were developed, including the Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) and the Red List Index of Ecosystems (RLIe). These indicators, designed to assess and monitor the status and trends of ecosystems at national and global scales, have since been adopted as key pillars of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Their integration into the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), adopted in 2022, further reinforced this commitment, with the framework setting ambitious targets, including halting and reversing ecosystem degradation, restoring 30% of degraded ecosystems, and protecting 30% of land and ocean areas by 2030, positioning these indicators as central tools for tracking progress toward global biodiversity goals.