Protected Areas (Canada)

Source: CPCAD (Environment and Climate Change Canada) Year: 2026 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Protected areas Coverage: Country (Canada), terrestrial and marine Format: Boundary polygons (federal / provincial / territorial / Indigenous / municipal / private) Used in risk analysis: Yes — gates Sensitive areas

What it shows

This layer maps the full network of protected and conserved areas across Canada, on land and at sea. It is drawn from the Canadian Protected and Conserved Areas Database (CPCAD), the country's authoritative national register, and spans every governance type: federal, provincial and territorial, Indigenous, municipal and private. Alongside conventional protected areas it carries other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) — sites that deliver lasting conservation outcomes without being formally designated as protected areas — and Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs), where Indigenous governments lead the designation and management.

Protected areas mark where development is restricted and where nature-related regulatory, reputational and access risk concentrates, making the layer a primary screening input for Canadian sites and supply chains.

How it is built

The boundaries come directly from CPCAD, maintained by Environment and Climate Change Canada and published as the national register underpinning Canada's conservation-target reporting. Darwin takes the full database, drops delisted sites, and reprojects from the source Albers projection to WGS84. Each polygon keeps its site name, designation category, governance sphere and reported area.

Two conventions make the sub-types filterable without extra columns: OECMs are prefixed OECM: in the category, and IPCAs are suffixed (IPCA) in the governance sphere. Reported areas that carry the register's "not reported" sentinel are treated as missing rather than as a real value. No score is computed — the layer is a presence-or-absence boundary set rather than a graded index.

How to read it

This is a boundary layer, so the relevant question is intersection: a site falling inside one of these polygons is flagged as overlapping a protected or conserved area. Overlap indicates potential exposure to conservation restrictions, permitting requirements and heightened stakeholder scrutiny — and, for an IPCA or an area under Indigenous or collaborative governance, to consultation and consent expectations that go beyond the standard permitting path. Sites outside the polygons carry no protected-area flag from this dataset.

The designation category and governance sphere qualify what an overlap means: a national park and a private conservation covenant both flag, but imply very different constraints.

Note that the polygons overlap each other by design — CPCAD carries parent sites alongside their constituent zones. Summing the reported areas therefore double counts (about 1.4 percent nationally); a national or regional total must be computed by unioning the geometry, not by adding areas.

Class thresholds

This layer does not model a continuous physical quantity, so it has no numeric class thresholds. It is a presence / boundary mask: each polygon is the mapped extent of a designated protected or conserved area, with no graded score attached. The attributes carried are categorical — site name, designation category, governance sphere — plus a reported area in hectares that describes the feature rather than scoring it.

The "classes" are therefore binary: inside a protected-area polygon versus outside. A site is flagged on the Sensitive areas dimension when it intersects one of the polygons; the trigger is geometric overlap with the feature (an intersection test), not the crossing of any value threshold, and the configuration defines no proximity buffer distance.

How these thresholds were set. There are no thresholds to set — class membership is the official designation carried by each feature, taken verbatim from CPCAD. Darwin reproduces Environment and Climate Change Canada's statuses as-is; no Darwin classification and no external numeric methodology is applied.

Coverage and validation

The layer holds 22 438 features. Checked against the global World Database on Protected Areas, the two agree on 99.4 percent of the WDPA extent and 98.6 percent of Darwin's — the strongest agreement among Darwin's national protected-area layers. Darwin's version is the larger of the two (22 438 features against roughly 17 500) because the WDPA's Canadian holdings are themselves a filtered export of this same federal database, so taking CPCAD directly recovers what that filtering removes.

Source

Canadian Protected and Conserved Areas Database (CPCAD), Environment and Climate Change Canada, published under the Open Government Licence – Canada.

Comparison with the WWF Risk Filter Suite

This layer corresponds to WWF Biodiversity Risk Filter indicator S14_1 Protected/Conserved Areas. The WWF Risk Filter Suite uses the global World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA, UNEP-WCMC, accessed via IBAT). Darwin instead takes Canada's own official register at source, which extends coverage relative to the global database — notably for OECMs and Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, categories the global export under-represents.

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