6th Joint OECD/UNECE Seminar on SEEA Implementation held online from 9-11 March 2021

This was the 6th of a series of Joint OECD/UNECE Seminars which was established in 2015. The main objectives of the seminars are to provide a platform for exchange of knowledge and experiences on SEEA implementation, and to facilitate coordination between all relevant partners in the OECD and UNECE regions. The seminar is organised regularly with a long-term view to support the implementation of the SEEA.

This year’s Seminar was held in the form of three-hour daily online sessions from 9-11 March. About 170 participants representing more than 45 countries plus NGOs, research, the private sector and international organisations attended the meetings.

The main topic of the 2021 seminar was “telling a good policy-relevant story with the SEEA”. This gave an opportunity for national statistical offices to showcase what SEEA can offer to inform important policy areas such as ecosystems and biodiversity,  circular economy and climate change, and also to learn about specific needs from users of that information. National examples from Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Estonia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Sweden were presented and discusse.

The seminar also provided participants with the latest developments on the global level, such as the adoption of chapters 1-7 of the revised “SEEA Ecosystem Accounting” as an international statistical standard at the 52nd Session of the United Nations Statistical Commission, progress of work of the London Group on Environmental-Economic Accounting and the environmental issues in updating the 2008 SNA.

All presentations and background documents are available at https://unece.org/statistics/events/joint-oecdunece-seminar-seea-implementation-online.

Recordings of the seminar can be found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe6uBaBVebZDovr14lJ8zP1rgGBZMcXk4

We thank all members of the Organising Committee: National Statistical Committee of the Republic of Belarus (Co-Chair), Statistics Netherlands (Co-Chair), Australian Bureau of Statistics, Statistics Canada, Statistics Finland, Federal Statistical Office of Germany, Statistics Committee of the Republic of Kazakhstan, National Statistical Committee of the Kyrgyz Republic, Statistics Sweden, Eurostat, UNDP Kyrgyzstan, UNSD, OECD, UNECE and Tillväxtanalys.