Serengeti National Park covers 14,750 km2 in northwestern Tanzania and is managed by TANAPA, a government parastatal, under an IUCN Category II designation established in 1951 and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It anchors the Greater Serengeti-Mara Ecosystem and generates Tanzania's highest single-park tourism revenue, with 491,398 visitors and over TZS 266 billion recorded in 2024-25. Governance and community relations carry material risks: the management plan remains ungazetted, a contested wildebeest count published in PNAS Nexus in September 2025 puts the migratory population at fewer than 600,000, and Parliament debated restoring direct revenue retention to TANAPA in June 2025, implying the centralised treasury structure constrains park-level operations.
Ten dimensions, each scored 1 to 5. Tier 1 dimensions carry more weight than tier 2. The composite is the weighted result, not a simple mean of this column.
| Dimension | Score | Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Biodiversity protection | 3 | Tier 1 |
| Ecosystem services (carbon and water) | 3 | Tier 1 |
| Security and anti-poaching | 2 | Tier 2 |
| Governance and accountability | 3 | Tier 2 |
| Ecotourism infrastructure | 4 | Tier 1 |
| Ecotourism revenues | 4 | Tier 2 |
| Community development | 3 | Tier 1 |
| Political and community leadership | 3 | Tier 2 |
| Budget | 3 | Tier 1 |
| Fundraising performance | 3 | Tier 1 |
PACE rates how well a protected area is actually run, not how important it is or how much wildlife it holds. A 5 on a dimension means that part of the operation is working. A 1 means it is not. Across the 200 areas Canopy rates, composites run from 1.23 to 4.29, so a 3 is a middling park and not a bad one.
The composite hides variation and that is the point of the table. An area can hold a respectable composite while failing on security or on budget, and those two failures need completely different responses. Anyone using this to make a decision should be reading the dimension, not the headline.
Small gaps are not differences. PACE has been reliability-tested once, on 20 areas, and the composite came back at 0.86 with a 95% interval from 0.61 to 0.97. That is a wide interval on a small sample. Two areas within a few tenths of each other should be treated as the same area until something else separates them.
Whether to fund this area. Canopy does not make that call. The score separates questions rather than ranking answers: a low budget dimension and a low security dimension point at different instruments and different diligence.
What is happening on the ground this week. PACE is a periodic assessment, last scored 2026-09-01. It is not a monitoring feed and it does not move when something changes on site.
How thin the evidence behind it is. This area carries a Medium evidence confidence tier, defined above. 182 of the 200 areas sit there, so it is the norm across the set rather than a mark against this area.
Whether money can reach Serengeti National Park is a separate question from how well it is run, and it is answered at the country level. Tanzania scores 3.27 of 5 on C-RISK. Read the Tanzania profile for the risk dimensions and the estimated cost of running the country’s protected areas.
| Score date | 2026-09-01 |
|---|---|
| Scoring version | pace-v1.1 |
| Model run | 2026-09-01 |
| Schema version | 1 |
| Evidence confidence | Medium |
| Boundary and area source | WDPA-Apr2026 |
| Operator | Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA) |
| Operator type | state |
| IUCN category | II |
| Established | 1951 |
| Canonical URL | https://canopyconservation.com/park/serengeti |
The full method is published, not summarised: the PACE methodology, including the rubric each dimension is scored against and the limits Canopy puts on it. What PACE has been tested against, and where it came back null, is at model validation.
Boundaries and area come from the World Database on Protected Areas, WDPA-Apr2026. Operator reporting is read as-of-2026-07-01 (incl. African Parks 2025). Scores are set against Canopy’s published rubric, pace-rubric-v1.1.
Canopy is a nonprofit and everything here is free to use. The one condition is attribution.
Canopy (2026). Serengeti National Park, Tanzania: PACE conservation effectiveness 3.02 of 5. Canopy Conservation, pace-v1.1. Retrieved from https://canopyconservation.com/park/serengeti
https://canopyconservation.com/park/serengeti
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.