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The world is currently experiencing an extinction crisis, with nearly one million plant and animal species threatened with extinction in the coming decades. The global drivers of biodiversity loss, changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution and invasion of alien species, are far outpacing our ability to prevent the destruction of wildlife and ecosystems. Together, these observations point to the advent of a sixth mass extinction, one caused by a single species: humans. We have failed, as a planet, to meet any of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets this decade, and just a minority of countries have ratified the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework have submitted their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans as of 2025.
It's critical that we focus efforts on solutions that will have the greatest effect on reducing the pressures that lead to biodiversity loss. Conservation needs an evidence-based and solutions-oriented analysis of what interventions will have the greatest impact on extinction and then prioritize bringing them to scale to achieve the most significant impact.
In response to this crisis, and in partnership with Re:wild, Project Drawdown, University of Oxford researchers, One Earth, and IUCN’s Green Status of Species, Conservation X Labs is building the Extinction Solutions Index (ESI) to evaluate, compare, and rank the most effective interventions to prevent species extinctions and promote diversity recovery, allowing governments, multilateral organizations, conservation entities and funders to prioritize projects with the greatest impact on the biodiversity crisis.
It's critical that we focus efforts on solutions that will have the greatest impact on biodiversity loss. Conservation needs an evidence-based evaluation and prioritized analysis of interventions.
Project Drawdown, a transformative and comprehensive assessment of solutions to reduce the greenhouse gasses causing climate change, is a phenomenal example of a framework that reimagined a discipline focused on problem identification and quantification into one focused on measuring solution impact and scaling those solutions. Project Drawdown identifies the major sources and sinks of greenhouse gasses and highlights market-ready practices and technologies that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions across each sector and compared these to business-as-usual emissions and costs.
The Extinction Solutions Index will similarly identify and compare solutions to the biodiversity crisis based on their likelihood of success, cost, and impact using the following interconnected steps.
