Protected Areas (Japan)

Source: Ministry of the Environment · Forestry Agency · MLIT (National Land Numerical Information) Year: 2025 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Protected areas Coverage: Country (Japan) Format: Boundary polygons (7,467 features) Used in risk analysis: Yes — gates Sensitive areas

What it shows

This layer maps the protected areas of Japan: the designations that restrict development and concentrate nature-related regulatory, reputational and access risk for a site in Japan.

It covers national parks with their zoning, national wildlife protection areas and nature conservation areas, protected forests and green corridors in national forests, quasi-national and prefectural natural parks, and prefectural nature conservation areas.

How it is built

The boundaries come from official open data, assembled into one set of polygons:

• National parks with their zoning, national wildlife protection areas and nature conservation areas come from the Ministry of the Environment (2025).
• Protected forests and green corridors in national forests come from the Forestry Agency, through MLIT National Land Numerical Information (2024).
• Quasi-national and prefectural natural parks and prefectural nature conservation areas come from MLIT National Land Numerical Information (2015). That source carries no park name, so these areas are labelled by type. Okayama is not included, because its data is for non-commercial use only.

Not included: prefectural wildlife protection areas (no source open to commercial use), offshore seabed conservation areas and fishery zones.

How to read it

This is a boundary layer, so the question is intersection: a site that falls inside one of these polygons overlaps a protected area and should be read as exposed to conservation restrictions and heightened scrutiny. Sites outside the polygons carry no protected-area flag from this dataset.

The designations overlap. A protected forest can sit inside a national park, so one piece of ground can carry several designations. Summing the areas therefore double counts: a national total must be computed by unioning the geometry. The popup gives the name, the category, the governance sphere and, for national parks, the zone.

Class thresholds

This layer does not model a continuous quantity, so it has no numeric class thresholds. It is a presence / boundary mask: each polygon is the mapped extent of a designated area, with no graded score attached.

A site is flagged on the Sensitive areas dimension when it intersects one of the polygons. The trigger is geometric overlap (an intersection test), not the crossing of any value.

How these thresholds were set. There are none to set. Membership is the official designation carried by each feature, taken from the agency releases; Darwin applies no classification and no numeric break of its own.

Source

Ministry of the Environment, Biodiversity Center of Japan (national parks, national wildlife protection areas, nature conservation areas; Public Data License 1.0). MLIT National Land Numerical Information (national forest, natural park and nature conservation area data; CC BY 4.0), nlftp.mlit.go.jp/ksj, processed by Darwin.

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 reads a global protected-areas compilation accessed through IBAT. Darwin takes the Japanese agencies' own open data at source, licensed for commercial use.

Risk analysis

A site is flagged on a dimension by combining a proximity trigger (this layer) with an activity trigger (the entity's ENCORE pressure/service). Proximity only → Potentially material; proximity and the matching ENCORE pressure/service is material → Very material; neither → Not material.

Legend

Symbolised as a single boundary set: stroke and fill #008000. The popup carries the name, category, governance sphere and zone.

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