Protected Areas (Madagascar)

Source: SAPM (Madagascar) Year: 2026 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Protected areas Coverage: Country (Madagascar) Format: Boundary polygons Used in risk analysis: No (contextual layer; not used in materiality scoring)

What it shows

This layer maps the national protected-area system of Madagascar, known as the Système des Aires Protégées de Madagascar (SAPM). It includes national parks, special reserves, wildlife reserves and candidate sites. Madagascar is one of the world's highest-priority biodiversity regions, so these areas concentrate conservation, regulatory, reputational and access risk, making the layer a key screening input for sites and supply chains in the country.

How it is built

The boundaries are drawn from the SAPM, sourced through the Resilience Madagascar geographic data platform run under the relevant national environment ministry. Site categories follow the definitions set out in the interministerial order of 2013. The designated sites are assembled into a single set of national-level polygons, each representing the official extent of a protected or candidate area. 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. Candidate sites signal areas under active consideration for protection. Areas outside the polygons carry no protected-area flag from this dataset.

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 SAPM protected-area polygons, and the only "classes" are the SAPM classification carried by each feature — Aire Protégée (designated protected area), Site Prioritaire (priority candidate site) and Site Potentiel (potential candidate site). These classes describe the legal status of the site, not an ordered scale of physical risk.

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 one of the SAPM polygons.

How these thresholds were set. There are no thresholds to set — class membership is the official SAPM status attached to each feature, following the definitions of the Malagasy interministerial order of 2013 and sourced through the Resilience Madagascar / MEEMF platform. Darwin reproduces those official statuses as-is; no Darwin classification and no external numeric methodology is applied.

Source

Système des Aires Protégées de Madagascar (SAPM), via the Resilience Madagascar / MEEMF geographic data platform. Site categories per the interministerial order of 2013.

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 SAPM dataset for Madagascar, which can extend or localise coverage relative to the global WDPA and additionally captures candidate sites not yet formally gazetted.

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