This is the 11th edition of The World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates, this one for 2022–2023. The consultation for this list was held in an open meeting on the evening of 12 January 2022, during the IPS-SLAPrim Joint Meeting (XXVIII Congress of the International Primatological Society - IPS and IV Congress of the Latin American Society of Primatology - SLAPrim) in Quito, Ecuador (9–15 January 2022). This session was attended by more than 100 people and we subsequently consulted with many experts to refine the information on those species that were selected. Note also that since the Quito IPS Congress, originally planned for 2020, was not held until January 2022, the 2020–2022 list of the World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates wound up being this list for 2022–2023.
Using the information obtained over the past six months, the IUCN has updated the profiles for those species remaining on the list from the 2018–2020 (2022) edition and for those from previous editions that were returned to the list, and we have added additional profiles for newly listed species. Of note, the 2018–2020 edition was the last that was published before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This publication is a joint initiative of the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group, the International Primatological Society and Re:wild.
This list has six species from Africa, four from Madagascar, eight from Asia, and seven from the Neotropics. Madagascar and Brazil both have four, Indonesia has three, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Nigeria, Panama, and Tanzania have two, and Argentina, Belize, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mexico, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Peru, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam each have one.
Eight of these primates are listed as among the world’s most endangered primates for the first time – those listed with an asterisk in Table 1. The remaining 17 species and subspecies have been listed in previous versions of the 25 most endangered primates. Fourteen primates were dropped from the previous list, 2018–2020. The changes made in this list compared to the previous iteration (2018–2020) were not because the situation of the 14 species that were dropped has improved. In some cases, the situation has in fact worsened. By making these changes the IUCN intends rather to highlight other, closely related species enduring equally bleak prospects for their survival.
During the discussion of the 2022–2023 list at the IPS-SLAPrim Joint Meeting (XXVIII IPS Congress and IV SLAPrim Congress) in Quito, a number of other highly threatened primates were considered for inclusion. For all of these, the situation in the wild is as precarious as it is for those that finally made it on the list, thus they have been included as ‘Other Species Considered’.