Members of the statistics community, represented by the Statistical Conference of the Americas, and of the geospatial information field, grouped together in a United Nations committee of experts, held today the first meeting of its kind carried out at a global level, at the headquarters of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile.

This joint meeting was inaugurated by ECLAC’s Executive Secretary, Alicia Bárcena; Mario Palma, Vice President of Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), in his role as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Statistical Conference of the Americas (SCA); and Rolando Ocampo, President of the United Nations Regional Committee on Global Geospatial Information Management for the Americas (UN-GGIM Americas).

In her speech, ECLAC’s most senior representative asserted that coordinating and articulating the activities of national statistics offices (NSOs) with national geographic institutes (NGIs) is key to devising protocols regarding spatial data infrastructure models, since these will also be a necessary input for constructing indicators to monitor the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Meanwhile, Mario Palma, Chair of the Executive Committee of the Statistical Conference of the Americas, advocated for strengthening the symbiosis between geography and statistics and underscored that Mexico and Brazil are the only countries in the region so far that have integrated the discipline of geospatial information into their work and their institutional architecture.

Rolando Ocampo, who also serves as Vice President of Geographical and Environmental Information at INEGI and as Co-Chair of the UN-GGIM at a global level, highlighted that this is the first meeting in which both groups of actors linked to statistics gather together. “The georeferencing of statistics is key to supporting the implementation and follow-up of the 2030 Agenda,” he added.

This meeting occurred in the framework of the (April 4-6) sixteenth meeting of the Executive Committee of the Statistical Conference of the Americas, which is an intergovernmental subsidiary body of ECLAC that brings together the heads of national statistical institutes from countries in the Americas and the Caribbean. Meanwhile, UN-GGIM Americas, in conjunction with the Chilean government, held on April 3-5 in Santiago a seminar on geospatial information, at which ECLAC’s Executive Secretary, Alicia Bárcena, also spoke during the opening session.