The European Commission's Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity (KCBD) just published a science for policy brief presenting the state of play and the future steps for the EU Biodiversity Strategy (EU BDS) dashboard as of April 2026.

The EU BDS Dashboard currently contains 19 indicators to monitor progress on 9 out of the 16 EU BDS targets. At the 9th meeting of the Monitoring and Assessment sub-group of the EU Biodiversity Platform (EUBP-MA) - the governance body of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 - held in April 2026, the KCBD presented three new candidate indicators for addition to the Dashboard.

These new candidate indicators are:

• Mean Target Achievement (MTA) on land (Target 1) - measuring the ecological representativeness of the EU's terrestrial protected areas network for habitats and species of EU conservation concern;

• Potential pressure of Invasive Alien Species (IAS) of Union Concern on ecosystems (Target 12) - quantifying the cumulative pressure that established IAS of Union Concern exert on EU ecosystems;

• Environmental Status of European Seas (Target 15) - providing three complementary indices on human pressures, state and environmental impacts that quantify progress towards Good Environmental Status under the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive, across all EU marine waters.

Together with the already-accepted indicator on the uptake of agro-ecological practices (Target 8), pending publication of its validated methodology, these additions - subject to EUBP-MA feedback and improvement - would bring the EU BDS Dashboard to 23 indicators covering 10 out of the 16 tracked strategy targets.

The EC's Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity will keep coordinating the identification of relevant indicators and consulting the EUBP-MA to complete the EU Biodiversity Strategy Dashboard and progressively improving the monitoring of the EU's progress in meeting its biodiversity policy targets.