Protected Areas (Brazil)

Source: CNUC/MMA + FUNAI Year: 2026 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Protected areas Coverage: Country (Brazil) Format: Boundary polygons (national / sub-national) Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)

What it shows

This layer delineates Brazil's officially designated protected areas and indigenous territories. Operating in or near these areas carries heightened regulatory, reputational and ecological sensitivity, so the layer helps flag sites that overlap with conservation designations or recognised indigenous lands.

How it is built

The layer combines two official Brazilian government sources. The National Registry of Conservation Units (CNUC), maintained by the Ministry of the Environment, supplies federal, state and municipal protected areas across all Brazilian conservation-unit categories — national parks, biological reserves, environmental protection areas, extractive reserves and others. To this it adds indigenous territories from FUNAI (the national indigenous affairs agency) wherever those are not already captured by the conservation-unit registry, avoiding double counting. The result is a set of boundary polygons covering the full range of national designations.

How to read it

This is a boundary layer rather than a graded scale. A site that falls inside, or close to, any protected-area or indigenous-territory polygon is flagged as intersecting a sensitive area. The category of the unit (for example a strict reserve versus an environmental protection area) indicates the nature of the designation.

Class thresholds

This is a categorical presence/boundary layer, not a continuous physical flux: there is no measured quantity, no unit and no numeric class breaks. The features are official Brazilian protected-area and indigenous-territory polygons; the only attribute is the designation category (national park, biological reserve, environmental protection area, extractive reserve, indigenous territory, …), which describes legal status rather than an ordered scale of physical risk.

The trigger is spatial overlap, not a threshold on a value: the proximity rule is a direct geometric intersection (type = "intersection", no distance buffer), flagging the Sensitive areas dimension when a site falls inside a protected-area or indigenous-territory polygon. This layer is contextual and is not used in materiality scoring.

How these thresholds were set. There are no thresholds to set — class membership is the official designation carried by each feature, taken verbatim from CNUC/MMA (conservation units) and FUNAI (indigenous territories). Darwin reproduces those official statuses as-is, de-duplicating FUNAI territories already covered by CNUC; no Darwin classification and no external numeric methodology is applied.

Source

CNUC/MMA (National Registry of Conservation Units, Ministry of the Environment) and FUNAI (indigenous territories), Brazil.

Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite

This layer corresponds to BRF S14_1 Protected/Conserved Areas. The WWF Risk Filter Suite relies on the global World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA, UNEP-WCMC via IBAT); Darwin instead assembles Brazil's own official datasets, which can extend and localise coverage — including indigenous territories — beyond what the global database holds.

Generated from darwin/layers/layer-protected-areas-brazil.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).