Protected Areas (Kazakhstan)

Source: Tabigat (Ministry of Ecology, Kazakhstan) Year: 2026 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Protected areas Coverage: Country (Kazakhstan) 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 territories across Kazakhstan. It includes state nature reserves (zapovedniks), national parks, wildlife sanctuaries (zakazniks), ecological corridors and other protected-territory categories. Protected areas mark places where development is restricted and where nature-related regulatory, reputational and access risk is concentrated, making them a key screening input for sites and supply chains in the country.

How it is built

The boundaries are taken from the official Tabigat geographic information platform, maintained by the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Kazakhstan. The platform records the full range of national protected-territory designations, which are assembled here into a single set of national-level polygons. Each polygon represents the official 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.

Class thresholds

This is a categorical presence/boundary layer, not a continuous physical flux: there is no measured quantity, no unit and no numeric class breaks. The features are Kazakhstan's legally protected territories — state nature reserves (zapovedniks), national parks, wildlife sanctuaries (zakazniks), ecological corridors and other categories — and the only attribute is the designation type, which describes legal status rather than an ordered scale of physical risk.

The trigger is spatial overlap, not a threshold on a value: the proximity rule is a direct geometric intersection (type = "intersection", no distance buffer), flagging the Sensitive areas dimension when a site falls inside a protected-territory polygon. This layer is contextual and is not used in materiality scoring.

How these thresholds were set. There are no thresholds to set — class membership is the official designation carried by each feature, taken verbatim from the Tabigat platform (Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Kazakhstan). Darwin reproduces those official statuses as-is; no Darwin classification and no external numeric methodology is applied.

Source

Tabigat geographic information platform, Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Kazakhstan (tabigat.gov.kz). Official national protected-territory designations.

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 uses the official national register for Kazakhstan, which can extend or localise coverage relative to the global WDPA and reflects designations as recorded by the responsible national ministry.

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