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The Environment Statistics Section (ESS) of the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), convened its Tenth meeting of the Expert Group on Statistics during the 3, 4, 6 and 10 October 2024 (https://unstats.un.org/unsd/envstats/fdes/fdes_eges10.cshtml). During this meeting there was a recommendation to create a small group on climate change questions for censuses and surveys which will assist countries to collect and compile data on the Global Set of Climate Change Statistics and Indicators (Global Set) where relevant. The Global Set, following a global consultation in 2021, was adopted at the fifty-third session of the United Nations Statistical Commission in March 2022 as the framework for climate change statistics and indicators to be used by countries when preparing their own sets of climate change statistics and indicators according to their individual concerns, priorities and resources (decision 53/116, Climate Change Statistics, https://unstats.un.org/UNSDWebsite/statcom/session_53/documents/2022-41-FinalReport-E.pdf)

The purpose of the group is multifunctional. In addition to reviewing existing sections and questions from censuses and surveys that are used to collect data for statistics and indicators of the Global Set it will identify new and innovative questions that countries can include in censuses and surveys to collect data for the Global Set at the national level. It will also review and update metadata for the Global Set which require data from censuses and surveys especially those relating to mitigation, adaptation and vulnerability. Eventually, the work of this group will be extended to build a repository of core and non-core questions suitable for censuses and surveys to collect data on climate change issues.

In order to assist countries the ESS with the support of the EGES offers a hub via its website, featuring a compilation of surveys and censuses that can be queried under various themes on the environment and climate. To further support countries in the development/strengthening of Climate Change statistics programmes, the Section has developed supporting tools including the Implementation Guidelines and Climate Change Statistics and Indicators Assessment Tool (CISAT).

With the intention to cross fertilize efforts and leverage expertise, the group recently collaborated with the Inter Secretariat working group on household surveys (ISWHS) group. Initial work among the two groups includes an exchange of the scope, objectives, outputs and links to resources and in this regard a power point presentation was presented by UNSD at the Inaugural Meeting on Revision of the United Nations Handbooks related to Household Surveys in China from 22-24 Jan 2024: https://unstats.un.org/iswghs/EventDetails/inaugural-meeting-handbook-hs-Jan2024 on the work of this small group.  

At its 55^th session, the Statistical Commission, inter-alia, approved the renaming of the Expert Group on Environment Statistics to the Expert Group on Environment and Climate Change Statistics to cover both topics given their close interrelationship. Further, the Commission encouraged national statistical systems to invest in the development of climate change statistics by enhancing the use of administrative data, designing specialized surveys or other data collection tools, and including climate and environment-related questions in relevant censuses and sample surveys as appropriate. The work of this small group will be presented at the 11th meeting of the Expert Group on Environment and Climate Change Statistics.

Upcoming events

• A webinar on small area estimation, organized by the Joint Program in Survey Methodology
  • Such a great honour to be speaking on our work with Dr. Fay (Fay-Harriot model), William Bell (US Census Bureau, the famous SAIPE programme), Partha Lahiri (Director of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology) and David Newhouse (World Bank, bringing in the geospatial dimension)
  • Date/time: 15 March 2024, 3:35-5:00pm ET
  • Concept note/registration: here

• Bayesian Variable Selection, organized by American Statistical Association’s Committee on International Relations in Statistics (CIRS) and by Statistics Without Borders (SWB)
  • Speaker: Professor Marina Vannucci 
  • Date/time: 6 March 2024, 12-1:30pm ET
  • Concept note/registration: here

TOPIC - Your Voice Matters: Contributing to the Copenhagen Framework on Citizen Data and its implementation

WHEN - Thursday, 15 February 2024 | 9:00-10:30am EST (REMOTE)

REGISTRATION - To register: link

Here are the new/exciting updates from the Inter-Secretariat Working Group on Household Surveys:

• We organized our first meeting on the revision of the Handbooks on household surveys, 22-24 January. Huge thanks to all the experts and the National Bureau of Statistics of China for your support.  Presentations for the meeting are available here. A short/concise report of the meeting is available here.
• We are dedicating an open side event to continue our conversation on the household survey handbook revision. During the side event, we will provide an update on what has been discussed in China, have a conversation with experts and solicit feedback from the audience.
• Date/time: 13 Feb, 9-10:30 ET
• Concept note/registration: here
• For a quick summary of the work of the ISWGHS in 2023:  look for agenda item 4(c), Section X
• A primer on SAE with geospatial data for input: here

You are invited to join the Asia-Pacific Stats Cafés on Data Governance across Asia and the Pacific for Pacific subregion, to be held on 22 January to 12 February 2024, Register for the event here.

• Click here to join the meeting
• More information about this session on Data Governance across Asia and the Pacific for Pacific subregion is available in the attached concept note.
• Event’s webpage is https://bit.ly/data-governance-Asia-Pacific.

The ESSnet Web Intelligence Network (WIN) project was launched by Eurostat in 2021 and aims to develop and nurture a network of like-minded individuals to have access to the Web Intelligence Hub, where they will be able to explore an array of non-traditional data sources to accelerate the modernisation of the European Statistical System (ESS).   

Building on the successful WIN webinar series delivered in 2022-2023, WIN will continue to provide a series of free webinars 2023-2024 open to all to keep the community updated on the work being carried out across the several work strands.   

The following webinars are now available to view: 

• New avenues with web intelligence: Gaining additional value from cash register data by combing different data sources - YouTube
• Measuring construction activities using data from the web - YouTube
• Web data in official statistics: process, challenges, solutions – the case of online real estate offers - YouTube
• Methods of Processing and Analysis of Web-Scraped Tourism Data – YouTube
• Using Web-Scraped Data to Enhance the Quality of Statistical Business Registers - YouTube
• Architecture Methodology and Quality – An Overview - YouTube

The following webinars are now available to book on Eventbrite: 

Measuring the quality of large-scale automated classification systems applied to online job advertisement data, 5 March 2024

• Measuring the quality – a quality assessment - in general- provides insight into the quality and usability of web-scraped data for producing official statistics. The quality assessment in this presentation is about Online Job Advertisements (OJA). The OJA data was assessed in a couple of ways by members of the WIN project. Firstly, the quality and stability of the sources were assessed with the help of quality indicators that were formulated for this task. Secondly, the accuracy of the classification of the OJA data was assessed through annotation exercises. They present the quality indicators and how they are operationalised in a reproducible manner for several countries.

For more information or to book your place, visit our Eventbrite page. 

For additional information on WIN, please access the project’s work packages, blogs and training pages. They have also published a project overview on the Data Science Campus website. To find out more or to get involved, contact us at ESSnet.project@ons.gov.uk. 

IASS website is: http://isi-iass.org/home/

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/international-association-of-survey-statisticians-iass

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/iass.isi

Twitter @iass_isi   https://twitter.com/iass_isi

IASS activities include:

• The Survey Statistician, IASS newsletter,  issued twice a  year, including country reports, new and emerging methods, ask the Experts, book reviews and upcoming journal articles and conferences  http://isi-iass.org/home/services/the-survey-statistician/
• A program of short courses prior to each ISI World Statistics Congress, as well as a program of invited paper sessions
• Sponsorship for relevant international conferences on survey statistics and survey methodology
• A website giving access to past material and up-to-date information through IASS monthly newsletters:         http://isi-iass.org/home/2023-newsletters/
• The monthly IASS Webinar Series showcasing  distinguished      speakers on the theory and practice of surveys and censuses:         http://isi-iass.org/home/webinars/
• The Cochran-Hansen Prize, awarded every two years for the best paper on survey research methods submitted by a young statistician from a developing country
• The Hukum Chandra Memorial prize, awarded every two  years to a mid-career researcher  who has made an important contribution in survey research  
• The link to the IASS brochure is here:    http://isi-iass.org/home/wp-content/uploads/IASS2022brochure_final_21012022.pdf

The link to the registration page to become a new member is https://www.isiwebshop.org/index.php?view=registration, and the link for renewals is here: https://www.isiwebshop.org/.

See below the ISWGHS September updates by Haoyi Chen 

On the 14^th of September 2023, the African Centre for Statistics (ACS) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) successfully conducted a StatsTalk-Africa Webinar series, which focused on Machine Learning for Economic Research. The sixth of the monthly webinar series had 148 attendees, with participants noting the timeliness and comprehensiveness of the presentation and expressing the need to tackle similar topics that expound on the uses and application of Machine Learning for economics and other socio-demographic indicators related to Sustainable Development Goals in future webinars. The recording of the webinar can be accessed at https://youtu.be/nK-j5QB955c.

In its continuing commitment to provide a space for dialogues about data, statistics, and innovative tools with data experts and users, the ACS wishes to invite everyone to the next StatsTalk-Africa. Concept notes and relevant materials for the upcoming webinar will be shared in due course.

Want to know more or keep up with the Web Intelligence Hub (WIH)? 

Don't hesitate to see the first edition of the Web Intelligence Hub Newsletter, which is an excellent information source about the WIH project.

Global Training on Disaggregated Estimates Using Small Area Estimation Methods in R is now available at https://learning.officialstatistics.org/enrol/index.php?id=103. The training was jointly developed by UNSD, ECLAC Statistics Division and UNFPA. You can register to take the course!

Also, two training handbooks on SAE have been added to the SAE4SDG platform in English and French.

UK Office for National Statistics has released following resources related to survey:

• Survey development toolkit: an overview of the research objectives and methods for each Agile phase of survey development
• Survey Strategy Research and Development Principles (SSRDP)
• Free training course: Data collection fundamentals

The ESSnet Web Intelligence Network (WIN) project was launched by Eurostat in 2021 and aims to develop and nurture a network of like-minded individuals to have access to the Web Intelligence Hub, where they will be able to explore an array of non-traditional data sources to accelerate the modernisation of the European Statistical System (ESS).   

Building on the successful WIN webinar series delivered in 2022-2023, WIN will continue to provide a series of free webinars 2023-2024 open to all to keep the community updated on the work being carried out across the several work strands.   

The following webinars are now available to view: 

• Web data in official statistics: process, challenges, solutions – the case of online real estate offers - YouTube
• Methods of Processing and Analysis of Web-Scraped Tourism Data – YouTube
• Using Web-Scraped Data to Enhance the Quality of Statistical Business Registers - YouTube
• Architecture Methodology and Quality – An Overview - YouTube

The following webinars are now available to book on Eventbrite: 

Measuring Construction Activities using Data from the Web, 5 October 2023  

• This webinar concentrates on using web scraping to extract data from real estate web portals for Official Statistics. Participants will be introduced to the structure of real estate portals in Germany and the importance of data from the web for Official Statistics. For more information or to book your place visit the Eventbrite page.

New avenues with Web Intelligence: Gaining additional value from cash register data by combining different data sources, 23 November 2023 

• The use of modern data sources in official statistics is a reality and has been well formulated in the foundations of Trusted Smart Statistics. One of the cases is to acquire additional knowledge based on the content of the websites. Extracting data from enterprise websites to get characteristics is a part of the project currently done by the Web Intelligence Network. 

The webinar will explore Statistics Sweden’s experiences and the challenges faced when using Consumer Price Index (CPI) production as an illustration. It will emphasise the prospect of increasing the accuracy of measurements in the CPI production process.  

For more information or to book your place visit the Eventbrite page. 

For additional information on WIN, please access the project’s work packages, blogs and training pages. A project overview on the Data Science Campus website has also been published. To find out more or to get involved, contact at ESSnet.project@ons.gov.uk. 

The event will be held through the Microsoft Teams, on Thursday, 6th July 2023, from 11:00 to 12:00hr, Bangkok time (UTC+7).

Please kindly scan the QR code in the attached flyer or click this link for registration: tinyurl.com/mk29wbt2

When it’s time, click this link to join the meeting: tinyurl.com/46hc4s6k 

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