Protected Areas (Egypt)
This layer maps the Egyptian protectorates, national parks and nature reserves that are mapped in OpenStreetMap. It covers about 40 percent of the national estate.
Source: OpenStreetMap Year: 2026 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Protected areas Coverage: Country (Egypt), terrestrial and marine — partial Format: Boundary polygons Used in risk analysis: Yes — gates Sensitive areas
What it shows
This layer maps protected areas in Egypt: the protectorates that make up the estate of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA), together with national parks, nature reserves and natural monuments. These mark where development is restricted and where nature-related regulatory, reputational and access risk concentrates.
This layer covers about 40 percent of Egypt's protected estate by area. Absence of overlap is not evidence that a site is unprotected. Read "Coverage is partial" below before using it for anything quantitative.
How it is built
The EEAA, Egypt's national custodian, maintains protectorate boundaries in a database it does not publish. No other openly licensed source covers them. Darwin therefore uses OpenStreetMap, the collaborative open geographic database, as it does for Thailand, Côte d'Ivoire and Costa Rica.
Features are selected from the designation categories OpenStreetMap uses for protected land, restricted to Egypt, then filtered by a two-part inclusion rule: a feature is kept if it substantially overlaps a site on the official designation checklist, or if its name carries an Egyptian protected-area designation. Both clauses are needed — the overlap test alone loses sites whose OpenStreetMap geometry is poor, and the name test alone loses sites OpenStreetMap tags with a protection class that does not signal nature protection.
Two groups are deliberately excluded. Archaeological World Heritage sites — Memphis, the pyramid fields, Ancient Thebes, Abu Simbel and Islamic Cairo — are dropped: OpenStreetMap tags them as protected areas, but they are cultural rather than natural protection. Two Israeli reserves that fall inside the query envelope across the Sinai border are dropped as out of country.
The designation category is read from the English designation in each site's name, falling back to the OpenStreetMap protection class; the area in hectares is computed from the geometry, since OpenStreetMap carries no reported area. No score is computed — the layer is a presence-or-absence boundary set rather than a graded index.
Coverage is partial
| Sites | Area | Share of Egypt | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Officially designated | 47 | 19.24 Mha | 19.2 % |
| This layer | 23 | 7.77 Mha | 7.8 % |
The layer holds 40 percent of the officially designated area, across 23 polygons that cover 27 of the 47 designated sites. The shortfall is not a processing failure — it is what OpenStreetMap contains. The largest absences are Gilf Kebir (5.27 Mha) and the Qattara Depression (2.23 Mha), neither of which is mapped at all, followed by Wadi Qena (0.81 Mha) and Siwa (0.77 Mha).
The structural cause is that the great majority of Egypt's estate is nationally designated and exists only in the EEAA's closed database. The internationally designated categories that do carry open licences — Ramsar sites and UNESCO World Heritage sites — are a small fraction of the estate, and Darwin already carries both as separate global layers.
Consequence for interpretation: expect false negatives in Egypt. Do not use this layer to compute national protected-area statistics, and do not read an absence of overlap as an absence of protection.
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 area. Overlap indicates potential exposure to conservation restrictions, permitting requirements and heightened stakeholder scrutiny.
One boundary deserves a caveat when reading a result. Wadi Al Alaqi Protectorate, the largest feature in the layer, is mapped in OpenStreetMap along administrative straight lines rather than a surveyed boundary. It sits inside the official designated area and is kept, but its edges are coarse; a site near its margin warrants a manual check.
As elsewhere, designations overlap, so a national or regional total must be computed by unioning the geometry rather than by summing reported 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 protected area in Egypt, with no graded score attached. The attributes carried are categorical — site name, designation category (Protectorate, National Park, Nature Reserve, Natural Monument, Protected Area) and governance sphere — plus an area in hectares computed from the geometry.
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 — the layer is a presence mask assembled by Darwin from OpenStreetMap designations. Classification into protected versus not-protected comes from the OpenStreetMap tags and the designation recorded in each site's name; no Darwin-defined or externally published numeric cut-offs are involved.
Because OpenStreetMap carries no governance attribute, the governance sphere is assigned rather than sourced: all features are recorded as national, since Egypt's protectorate estate is EEAA administered.
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 a global protected-areas compilation accessed via IBAT. Darwin instead assembles a national dataset for Egypt from collaborative open mapping. Here the global compilation is materially more complete: it carries Egypt's full designated estate, whereas this layer carries only the portion that is openly mapped. Egypt is the country where Darwin's protected-area coverage is weakest, and a negative result should be weighted accordingly.
Generated from darwin/layers/layer-protected-areas-egypt.toml and risk_indicator_pairs.toml (develop).