Protected Areas (United Kingdom)

Source: Natural England · NatureScot · Scottish Government · Welsh Government (DataMapWales) · Natural Resources Wales · NIEA (DAERA) Year: 2026 Category: Transition risks · Sensitive areas · Protected areas Coverage: Country (United Kingdom), terrestrial and marine Format: Boundary polygons (10,705 features) Used in risk analysis: Yes — gates Sensitive areas

What it shows

This layer maps the statutory protected areas of the United Kingdom: the designations that restrict development, carry permitting duties and concentrate nature-related regulatory, reputational and access risk for a UK site.

It covers Sites of Special Scientific Interest (Areas of Special Scientific Interest in Northern Ireland), Special Areas of Conservation, Special Protection Areas, Ramsar sites, National Nature Reserves, Local Nature Reserves, National Parks, National Landscapes (formerly Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty), National Scenic Areas in Scotland, Marine Conservation Zones and Nature Conservation Marine Protected Areas.

How it is built

The boundaries come from the open data published by the four national conservation agencies and their governments: Natural England for England, NatureScot and the Scottish Government for Scotland, the Welsh Government (DataMapWales) and Natural Resources Wales for Wales, and NIEA within DAERA for Northern Ireland. Darwin assembles the national releases into one set of polygons, each keeping its site name, designation category, governance sphere and an area in hectares.

Two source decisions are worth stating.

The UK is not in Natura 2000 any more. The Natura 2000 layer stopped covering the United Kingdom after Brexit, so the national designations replace it here rather than supplement it.

WDPA / Protected Planet is deliberately not used. Its terms forbid commercial use and redistribution of derivative works without a paid IBAT licence, so the national agency releases, published under the Open Government Licence v3, are the source of record.

Governance sphere is carried from the designation: international for SAC, SPA and Ramsar, national for the domestic statutory designations, local for Local Nature Reserves. UK designations carry no IUCN management category of their own, so the iucn field holds the crosswalk the agencies use when reporting to the Common Database on Designated Areas; the international designations are recorded as "Not reported".

How to read it

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

The designations overlap by design. SSSI underpins most terrestrial SACs, SPAs and NNRs, so one piece of ground routinely carries three designations at once. Summing the areas therefore double counts: a national or regional total must be computed by unioning the geometry. The same overlap means a single site can return several features, and the strictest of them, not the first, is the one that governs.

The designation category qualifies what an overlap means. A National Landscape is a landscape-scale planning designation, while an SSSI or an SAC carries site-level consent requirements on operations likely to damage the features; both flag, and they imply very different constraints.

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. The attributes carried are categorical (site name, designation category, governance sphere, IUCN crosswalk) plus an area in hectares that describes the feature rather than scoring it.

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 (an intersection test), not the crossing of any value, and the configuration defines no proximity buffer distance.

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

Source

Natural England, NatureScot, the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government (DataMapWales), Natural Resources Wales and NIEA (DAERA), under the Open Government Licence v3. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right. Contains Natural Resources Wales information © Natural Resources Wales and Database Right; Ordnance Survey Licence number AC0000849444.

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 instead takes the UK agencies' own registers at source, which is both more current and licensed for commercial use, and which restores the UK coverage that the Natura 2000 layer lost after Brexit.

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 site name, designation category, governance sphere and IUCN crosswalk.

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