Integrated big data informs policies on climate change and sustainable development

As the world grapples with numerous global challenges, including environmental issues, climate change, health crises, food insecurity, economic recovery, and human displacement, the need for knowledge integration has never been more critical. Amid a data landscape with fast-increasing volumes of big data, information remains compartmentalized to pre-defined scales and fields, rarely building its way up to collective knowledge. 

The statistical community, the data science community, the geospatial community and the modelling community are called upon to deliver this integrated knowledge and shed light on the complex problems with intertwined and multistakeholder solutions.

Within its overall theme of “Informing Climate Change and Sustainable Development policies with integrated data”, the conference in Bilbao on 10-14 June 2024 – organized by the UN Committee of Experts on Big Data and data science for official statistics – will address and share knowledge on these emerging issues that require the timely and flexible production of integrated scientific, statistical and geospatial information. This involves collaboration with strategic partners from the public and private sectors, as well as from academic and research institutes, and needs a paradigm shift that will favor open synthesis to contribute and reuse knowledge and apply it toward decision making. 

The conference will feature an opening day with high-level dialogues between policymakers and statisticians, followed by three days of more technical sessions as well as several workshops. The sessions include measuring climate change in Latin America and the Caribbean, assessing physical and transition risks of climate change, relating climate change and health, measuring the sustainability of tourism, informing biodiversity policies, as well as more data-focused sessions on knowledge commons, data science and SDG localization, data science and transport, and use of geospatial information to develop ecosystem extent maps. 

The work of the regional and global hubs on Big Data and data science for official statistics will also be highlighted and several demo sessions will be held, including demos on the use of AIS data for near real-time maritime transport indicators. The conference week will be concluded with three  short training workshops for staff of statistical offices on ARIES for SEEA, use of mobile phone data for official statistics and on coordination of activities of the regional and global hubs. 

For more information: 
8th International Conference on Big Data and Data Science for Official Statistics

Photo: Markus Spiske on Unsplash