The Canopy Global 1000 ranks the world’s land protected areas by conservation value: how irreplaceable the species they hold are, how connected they are to other protected land, and how intact they are, weighted by size. Plant data is being added to the ranking, so both versions are shown side by side. Neither is the final word.
Without plants, Xe Xap ranks 85 of 1,000. With plants it ranks 201. It stays in the top 300 either way, which is why it is here.
Management-effectiveness ratings published outside Canopy, each on its publisher’s own scale. They are not PACE scores, some are self-assessments, and different methods and years are never converted into one another or ranked together.
No published assessment found. No public, dated management-effectiveness rating verified for Xe Xap. Searched sources found no park-level scored assessment that could be cited from a primary document; GD-PAME entries were not used because of its non-commercial licence. This is a research gap, not evidence that no assessment exists.
Lead not counted: Global Environment Facility / UNDP: CEO Endorsement: GEF ID 11103 (UNDP, Lao PDR), portal print 11 December 2024. METT baseline 61 from project preparation surveys, but the document states no assessment year; not counted.
Sources checked for this area:
World Bank: Implementation Status and Results Report, Second Lao Environment and Social Project (P128393), sequence 14. Portfolio-level cumulative METT indicator only; no park-level score published.
UNESCO World Heritage Centre: UNESCO World Heritage Convention: Lao PDR (State Party page). Not an inscribed World Heritage property or component; no IUCN World Heritage Outlook assessment exists.
Global Environment Facility / UNDP: CEO Endorsement: GEF ID 11103 (UNDP, Lao PDR), portal print 11 December 2024. Baseline METT 61 for Xe Sap NPA found without an assessment year.
Retrieved 2026-10-05. A park with no rating here may still have one that was not found or could not be cited from a primary document.
1.78 million tonnes of carbon inside the boundary is irrecoverable: if it were lost, it could not be recovered by 2050.
1,521 km² of the area was forest in 2000, 100% of it. 48.4 km² of that forest was lost between 2001 and 2024, 3.2% of the 2000 cover.
Forest means at least 30% tree canopy in 2000. Loss counts any clearing, including fire and natural disturbance, not only deforestation.
Canopy’s PACE management score, its country readiness score (C-RISK) and its weekly satellite feeds cover African protected areas today. They have not been published for this area.
| WDPA id | 71261 |
|---|---|
| Canopy Global 1000 list | September 2026 edition |
| Boundary and area source | WDPA-Jun2026 |
| Forest source | Hansen Global Forest Change v1.12 |
| Carbon source | Noon et al. (2022) |
| Canonical URL | https://canopyconservation.com/park/xe-xap |
UNEP-WCMC and IUCN (2026), Protected Planet: The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) [June 2026], Cambridge, UK: UNEP-WCMC and IUCN. Available at: www.protectedplanet.net.
Hansen, M. C. et al. (2013), High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change, Science 342: 850-853. Data: Global Forest Change 2000 to 2024, v1.12, University of Maryland, CC BY 4.0.
Noon, M. L. et al. (2022), Mapping the irrecoverable carbon in Earth’s ecosystems, Nature Sustainability 5: 37-46, doi:10.1038/s41893-021-00803-6.
How the Canopy Global 1000 is built: the method is available to signed-in readers; ask for access.
If you manage or work with this protected area and something here is wrong or out of date, tell us. Every correction is reviewed.
Everything here is free to use. The one condition is attribution.
Canopy (2026). Xe Xap, Laos: Canopy Global 1000 rank 85 without plants, 201 with plants. Canopy Conservation, September 2026 edition. Retrieved from https://canopyconservation.com/park/xe-xap
https://canopyconservation.com/park/xe-xap
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.