Protected Areas (Colombia)

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

What it shows

This layer delineates Colombia's officially designated protected areas and indigenous lands. 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 territories.

How it is built

The layer combines two official Colombian government sources. The National Single Registry of Protected Areas (RUNAP), managed by the Ministry of Environment (MADS), supplies all national and regional conservation categories — national parks, forest reserves, regional management districts and civil-society reserves among them. To this it adds indigenous resguardos from the National Land Agency (ANT) wherever those are not already captured by RUNAP, 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-resguardo polygon is flagged as intersecting a sensitive area. The conservation category indicates the nature and strictness of the designation.

Class thresholds

This is a categorical presence/boundary layer: it does not model a continuous physical quantity, so there is no measured flux, no unit and no numeric class breaks. The features are official protected-area and indigenous-resguardo polygons, and the only "classes" are the conservation categories carried by each polygon — National Natural Park, National/Regional Protective Forest Reserve, National/Regional Integrated Management District, Fauna/Flora Sanctuary, Civil Society Natural Reserve, Indigenous Reserve (Resguardo), and the other RUNAP/ANT designations. These categories describe the type and strictness of the designation; they are not ordered risk thresholds.

The trigger is spatial overlap, not a threshold on a value. The layer's proximity rule is a direct geometric intersection (type = "intersection", no distance buffer): a site is flagged on the Sensitive Areas dimension when it falls inside a protected-area or resguardo polygon.

How these thresholds were set. There are no thresholds to set — class membership is the official designation attached to each feature by the Colombian government sources (RUNAP/MADS for conservation categories, ANT for indigenous resguardos). Darwin reproduces those official categories as-is; no Darwin classification and no external numeric methodology is applied.

Source

RUNAP/MADS (National Single Registry of Protected Areas, Ministry of Environment) and ANT (National Land Agency, indigenous resguardos), Colombia.

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 Colombia's own official datasets, which can extend and localise coverage — including indigenous resguardos — beyond what the global database holds.

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