UNEP launched an online training course on one of the EW-MFA components – Domestic Extraction

In November 2022, UNEP launched an online training course on Domestic Extraction, which is a component of the Economy-Wide Material Flow Accounts (EW-MFA). The online training course was developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) as a part of the UNEP EW-MFA Capacity Building Initiative and is available on the UNEP eLearning platform.

The online training course includes a set of videos on statistics for all four categories of domestic extraction for the EW-MFA, such as biomass, metal ores, non-metallic minerals and fossil fuels, and will allow users to improve their knowledge in this area. In parallel with the development of the online course, UNEP, in collaboration with CSIRO, provided a webinar for Uruguay on building the EW-MFA and in particular the domestic extraction component in August 2022.

This training course is just the first phase of the UNEP EW-MFA Capacity Building Initiative. The second phase of the initiative will provide online courses for the rest of the EW-MFA components, such as imports and exports of materials, material outflows and balancing items. In the third phase, UNEP plans to organize a series of webinars on EW-MFA for all regions.

The training materials will support national statistical offices and other relevant agencies in their efforts to compile data on EW-MFA and can be used together with the Global Manual on Economy-Wide Material Flow Accounting and a user-friendly EW-MFA data compiler currently being developed in xlsx format by UNEP. The EW-MFA data compiler is planned to be released in the first quarter of 2023.

If you have any questions or requests related to the activities on EW-MFA, please contact the SDG and Environment Statistics Unit of UNEP (unep-science-sdgs@un.org) and copy Ekaterina Poleshchuk (ekaterina.poleshchuk@un.org) and Dany Ghafari (dany.ghafari@un.org).