Protected Areas Portfolio

KfW is currently starting an effort to update and complement georeferencing the protected areas portfolio. Currently there is a collection of about 1000 protected areas that are being financed by KfW from the year 2000 onwards. The process involves reviewing the official project documentation and filtering out the names and countries of supported areas. This information is used to identify and download the geographical boundaries as well as relevant policy information from the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA). About 80-90% of supported areas can be found within this database but geographical boundaries should be confirmed since some of the areas might be outdated. Georeferences for areas that are not in the WDPA must be sent to KfW by the project partners. Our current effort consists in complementing and updating data for 2022 and 2023. The process is based on the open “project location model” from KfW and it will enable the processing open datasets that are provided by the mapme.biodiversity package for our whole portfolio. The data is already being used e.g., by KfW’s operational departments to develop the conservation portfolio in the context of voluntary carbon markets (estimate carbon credit potentials in supported protected areas).