Protected Areas (Costa Rica)
This layer maps the network of legally protected areas across Costa Rica, including national parks, wildlife refuges, biological reserves, protected zones and nature res…
Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Protected areas Coverage: Country (Costa Rica) Format: Boundary polygons Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)
What it shows
This layer maps the network of legally protected areas across Costa Rica, including national parks, wildlife refuges, biological reserves, protected zones and nature reserves. Protected areas signal places where development is restricted and where nature-related regulatory, reputational and access risk is concentrated, making them an important screening input for any site or supply-chain footprint in the country.
How it is built
The boundaries are drawn from OpenStreetMap, a collaborative open geographic database. Areas are selected from the relevant designation categories used in OpenStreetMap to tag protected land, national parks and nature reserves, then assembled into a single set of national-level polygons. Each polygon represents the mapped extent of a designated site. 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 that falls inside, or close to, one of these polygons is flagged as overlapping a protected area. Overlap indicates potential exposure to conservation restrictions, permitting requirements and heightened stakeholder scrutiny. Areas outside the polygons carry no protected-area flag from this dataset.
Source
OpenStreetMap contributors, made available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Boundaries derived from the protected-area, national-park and nature-reserve designations recorded in the database.
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 assembles a national dataset for Costa Rica, which can extend or localise coverage relative to the global WDPA but is sourced from collaborative open mapping rather than the official protected-area register.
Generated from darwin/layers/layer-protected-areas-costa-rica.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).