Chad pairs a chronically weak governance and institutional base with active cross-border conflict spillover from Sudan and recurrent farmer-herder violence. Capital pathway risk is elevated by CEMAC-wide FX controls and a restrictive associations law, though a new four-year IMF programme and EU donor engagement provide some structure. Site durability is live and material: Chad briefly terminated its 15-year African Parks mandate over Zakouma and Ennedi in October 2025 before reversing under EU pressure, exposing real fragility in concession and operator tenure.
Nine dimensions, each scored 1 to 5. Tier 1 dimensions carry more weight than tier 2.
| Dimension | Score | Tier | Group |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conflict and security | 2 | Tier 1 | Stability |
| Governance baseline | 1 | Tier 1 | Stability |
| Capital flow freedom | 2 | Tier 2 | Capital Pathway |
| Fiscal capacity | 3 | Tier 1 | Capital Pathway |
| Donor environment | 3 | Tier 1 | Capital Pathway |
| Carbon and biodiversity market policy | Not scored | Tier 2 | Capital Pathway |
| Protected area legal durability | 4 | Tier 2 | Site Durability |
| Land tenure and concession security | 2 | Tier 2 | Site Durability |
| Operator-government relations | 2 | Tier 2 | Site Durability |
C-RISK asks whether conservation money can be put to work in a country and survive. It runs 1 to 5 and higher is better, so Chad’s 2.88 is a reading on the country as a financing environment. Across all 54 countries the scores run from 1.20 to 3.80, so this is a relative scale and not an absolute one.
It is a financing judgment, not a conservation one. A country can protect its parks well and still score low because its debt position, its courts or its capital controls make a deal hard to structure. The two questions come apart, which is why the park scores below sit on the same page and are not folded into this number.
The composite averages dimensions that measure different things. A single low dimension can be the whole story and disappear into the mean. Read the table, then the number.
C-FIN multiplies a country’s terrestrial protected area by a published per-square-kilometre management-cost benchmark. Marine protected areas are out of scope, so a country protected largely at sea carries a small need here.
| Terrestrial protected area | 264,432 km² |
|---|---|
| Rate applied | $5,494 per km² per year |
| Where that rate comes from | Fitted to this country from the benchmark study. It falls outside the $375 to $1,791 band the cited sources support. |
| Estimated annual need | $1.45bn per year |
| On the cited floor rate instead | $99.2M per year, at $375 per km² |
| On the cited ceiling rate instead | $473.6M per year, at $1,791 per km² |
The last two rows are a counterfactual on the choice of rate, not an interval around the estimate. They ask what the total would be if the cited forest floor or the cited lion-security ceiling were applied uniformly instead. For a country priced at its own fitted rate the estimate can sit outside them, and on nine countries it does.
Whether any particular park is worth funding. C-RISK is a country reading. It says nothing about how any individual protected area inside Chad is run, and the PACE scores below routinely disagree with it in both directions.
What any park actually needs. The C-FIN figure applies one published rate to the whole terrestrial estate. It is a scale estimate for a country, not a budget for a site, and it takes no account of what any park currently spends.
That the score has been independently checked. No C-RISK country score carries an external verification yet. The field is in the data as verified and it is false for all 54.
5 of the 200 areas Canopy rates sit in Chad. The figure beside each is its PACE composite.
All 54, with the C-RISK composite beside each.
| Score date | 2026-10-01 |
|---|---|
| Scoring version | risk-v2.0 |
| Model run | 2026-10-01 |
| Schema version | 2 |
| Independently verified | No |
| C-FIN schema | funding_gap/1.9 |
| C-FIN generated | 2026-10-01 |
| Canonical URL | https://canopyconservation.com/country/chad |
Both models are scored against a written method, with the validation results for every Canopy model, including what has failed, beside it: the method is available to signed-in readers; ask for access.
C-RISK reads the World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators, sovereign ratings and bond spreads, and Transparency International’s corruption index, alongside Canopy’s own scoring of legal durability, tenure and operator relations. C-FIN’s cost benchmark is Correa, R.J. et al. (2024). Performance of protected areas in conserving African elephants. Conservation Letters 17:e13041. Available at https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.13041. Canopy converts its published median to June 2026 dollars using US CPI-U.
Sources credited: World Bank, Worldwide Governance Indicators (CC BY 4.0); Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index (CC BY-ND 4.0); conflict event data from ACLED, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (acleddata.com); sovereign ratings as published by Moody’s, S&P Global and Fitch.
Canopy builds its scores from publicly available information: official registries, government and operator reports, research, satellite records and the press. It publishes them to encourage transparent reporting of protected-area performance and to help raise the bar across all protected areas. Part of the score follows published sovereign credit ratings; the rest is Canopy’s own reading of the public record.
If you work in or with this country’s conservation sector and something here is wrong or out of date, tell us. Every correction is reviewed, and the record is updated where the evidence supports it.
Everything here is free to use. The one condition is attribution.
Canopy (2026). Chad: C-RISK conservation deal readiness 2.88 of 5. Canopy Conservation, risk-v2.0. Retrieved from https://canopyconservation.com/country/chad
https://canopyconservation.com/country/chad
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Reuse, redistribute and build on this, commercially or not, as long as Canopy is credited and the licence is named. The C-FIN cost benchmark is a third-party publication and carries its own terms; cite it directly.