The IUCN advises that species categorised as not evaluated "... should not be treated as if they were non-threatened.
It may be appropriate ... to give them the same degree of attention as threatened taxa, at least until their status can be assessed.
"[4]: 7 [5]: 76 By 2015, the IUCN had assessed and allocated conservation statuses to over 76,000 species worldwide.
However, despite estimates varying widely as to the number of species existing on Earth (ranging from 3 million up to 30 million), this means the IUCN's 'not evaluated' (NE) category is by far the largest of all nine extinction risk categories.
[6] The global IUCN assessment and categorization process has subsequently been applied at country and sometimes at regional levels as the basis for assessing conservation threats and for establishing individual Red Data lists for those areas.