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World Bank · Climate

Marine protected areas

Marine protected areas are areas of intertidal or subtidal terrain--and overlying water and associated flora and fauna and historical and cultural features--that have been reserved by law or other effective means to protect part or all of the enclosed environment.

Coverage
174 of 238 countries
Latest data
2025
Series
174
Unit
percent
Licence
CC BY 4.0
Retrieved
2026-11-05
Indicator
marine-protected-areas
Interva ID
worldbank-marine-protected-areas

Recency

current

data to 2025; catalog to 2025

Provenance

3 steps

as the publisher declares it

Versions

1

catalog snapshots

Citation

BibTeX + CSL

versioned permalink

Quality profile

This profile describes what Interva can measure in the data. It does not claim the dataset is accurate, complete, or suitable for a particular use.

Recency

100%

Latest observation is 2025; the catalog broadly reports to 2025, so this data is 0 year(s) behind (current).

Method: Compares the dataset's latest non-projected period with the year most datasets in the catalog end in. Up to 2 years behind is current — annual data is routinely published a year or two late — and more than 5 is stale. Measured from the data, not from when Interva last crawled it.

Temporal completeness

100%

2 of 174 series skip at least one year inside their own span; the median series reports 100% of its years.

Method: Per series, years present divided by years from its first to its last observation; the median across series is reported. Annual periods are assumed, which holds for every series in the catalog today.

Geographic coverage

Measured

Covers 174 of the 238 countries in the catalog.

Method: Counts distinct geographies with at least one observation. Not scored: a regional dataset covering its region completely is not deficient for omitting the rest of the world.

History depth

Measured

The median series has 13 observations; the earliest begins in 2013.

Method: Counts non-projected observations per series. Not scored: a long history is useful for trend work and irrelevant for a cross-section.

Revisions

Measured

No observation has been restated in any vintage Interva has recorded.

Method: Counts values the publisher changed between Interva's publishes. Not scored: revising estimates is ordinary and often a sign of care, and the count is here so a reader citing a figure knows whether it moves.

Schema conformity

Not assessed

No declared schema or validation rules are attached to this dataset yet.

Validity

Not assessed

No field-level validation rules are attached to this dataset yet.

Consistency

Not assessed

Cross-series consistency rules are not defined yet. The obvious first one — whether two publishers measuring one concept agree within a stated tolerance — is a candidate.

2 scored from the data, 3 described without a score, 3 not assessed. Pipeline integrity: all 5 checks pass. Assessed 2026-11-07.

By country

Marine protected areas for each of the 174 countries it covers, with the full history.

Latest observations

CountryPeriodValueUnit
Albania20253.40percent
Algeria20250.10percent
American Samoa20258.70percent
Angola20250percent
Antigua and Barbuda20250.70percent
Argentina202512percent
Aruba20250.40percent
Australia202545.40percent
Azerbaijan20251percent
Bahamas20257.70percent

Provenance

Who produced these figures, as World Bank declares it — not inferred, and each line says which published field it was read from.

  1. Produced by

    UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre

    Protected Planet: The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) and World Database on Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (WD-OECM), UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), uri: https://www.protectedplanet.net/en, note: Only the latest data can be retrieved from the Protected Planet website. The time series are provided directly to WDI by Protected Planet., publisher: Protected Planet, date accessed: 20240516, date published: 202405

    declared by worldbank in sourceOrganization

    International Union for Conservation of Nature

    International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), uri: https://www.protectedplanet.net/en, publisher: Protected Planet, date accessed: 20240516

    declared by worldbank in sourceOrganization

  2. Read from

    World Bank

    World Development Indicators

    declared by worldbank in source

Versions

A vintage is a dated publish of the catalog. The current entry is a catalog snapshot; checksums are not recorded yet and are shown as such.

  • CurrentCurrent catalog snapshotchecksum not recorded

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Citation

Version: catalog snapshot 2026-11-05. The record labels this as a catalog snapshot because immutable dataset releases are not stored yet.

World Bank (2026). Marine protected areas. Interva. https://interva.co/dataset/worldbank-marine-protected-areas (accessed 2026-11-07). catalog snapshot 2026-11-05.

BibTeX
@misc{interva-worldbank-marine-protected-areas,
  title        = {Marine protected areas},
  author       = {World Bank},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://interva.co/dataset/worldbank-marine-protected-areas}},
  note         = {Interva dataset worldbank-marine-protected-areas; catalog snapshot 2026-11-05},
  urldate      = {2026-11-07}
}

DOI: not assigned (not assigned). The permalink is versioned by catalog snapshot; a stable dataset DOI is a later step.

API access

Every fact on this page is available from the API.

curl https://interva-api.nq5kq4f69b5zj.eu-west-3.cs.amazonlightsail.com/datasets/worldbank-marine-protected-areas
curl -o worldbank-marine-protected-areas.csv https://interva-api.nq5kq4f69b5zj.eu-west-3.cs.amazonlightsail.com/datasets/worldbank-marine-protected-areas/download
curl "https://interva-api.nq5kq4f69b5zj.eu-west-3.cs.amazonlightsail.com/datasets/worldbank-marine-protected-areas/citation?accessed=YYYY-MM-DD"
curl https://interva-api.nq5kq4f69b5zj.eu-west-3.cs.amazonlightsail.com/datasets/worldbank-marine-protected-areas/quality

Full schema: https://interva-api.nq5kq4f69b5zj.eu-west-3.cs.amazonlightsail.com/docs

Open in the terminal to chart this series, compare it against other publishers, or export it with its provenance.

Marine protected areas · World Bank · Interva