Fig. 1: Global distribution of protected areas (PAs) and unprotected areas in a social-environmental space.

This 2-dimensional space was built with 14 local and national social-environmental factors (Tables 1 and 2) on land and sea using an ecological niche factor analysis (ENFA) (see ‘Methods’). Most restrictive PAs (IUCN category I only) are represented in darker colours, while PAs from all IUCN categories (IUCN categories I–VI) are represented in lighter colours. Thin lines in the central panels denote the extent of the niche for each cell category. The influence of social-environmental factors on the construction of the niche spaces is represented by bar plots in the lower panels (orange bars for socioeconomic factors and green bars for environmental factors). Marginal distributions of each grid cell category along the two first axes are represented with density plots. Source data and codes are provided at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11183846.