NBS Indicators

1. Protected Forest Area
Protected forest areas refer to the forest areas that are legally protected by governments for conservation. All
nations have protected forest areas within conservation area, national parks, wildlife reserves, bioreserves and
so on. Deforestation and illegal hunting in these areas are strictly prohibited as these areas contain endangered
plants and animal species and any illegal activities are punishable by laws.
Methodology
The preferred spatial representation of protected areas map is from the national land use map if available. The
responsible departments usually have the detailed land use map categorizing different forest types based on
their use. The polygons of protected areas can be obtained from national LULC maps or from the World
Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The available
forest maps can be overlaid with the protected areas to identify protected forest area in hectares or percentages.
Figure 6 shows the overview of the different protected areas of Vietnam, whose boundaries can be downloaded.
Figure 1: Total protected areas of Vietnam obtained from WDPA-UNEP
Table 27 shows the data required for estimating protected forest area.
Table 1: Input data required for estimating protected forest area cover
Variable Dataset
Forest cover National LULC map (preferred)
Protected forest area National forest data with
different forest types (preferred)