Abstract

This paper is a case study on the role of the national statistical offices (NSO) in developing the climate change statistics. The NSOs are the best resources for statistics on the progress made within the countries in line with the international agreed-upon development agenda. One duty of the NSOs is to provide timely, relevant, and reliable statistics to public and international agencies to report on the progress made in every country within the national or international development programs. This research looks at the statistical information on the environment and climate change issues which the Statistical Centre of Iran as the focal point for official statistics in the I.R. Iran publishes annually.
There are two chapters in the Iran Statistical Yearbook which present the statistics on the climate and environment. Chapter one (land and climate) includes statistics on ‘geographical characteristics and administrative divisions,’ and ‘climate.’ Chapter 2 (environment) presents statistics collected from various resources on water, soil, and air. The only available data on climate change in this publication is about Sustainable Development Goal indicator 13.2.2: total greenhouse gas emissions per year, which shows statistics on emission of greenhouse gases such as the vapour of H2O, CO2, NO2, CH4, O3, HFCs, and PFCs. There are no statistics for other SDGs indicators related to climate change such as indicators 1.5.1, 1.5.2 and 1.5.4 for Goal one, indicator 2.4.1 for Goal 2, indicator 11.b.2 for Goal 11, indicators 13.1.1, 13.1.3, 13.3.1 for Goal 13. These data gaps show that climate change domain has been narrowed to the greenhouse gas emissions and statistics for other aspects of climate change aren’t collected or available in a disaggregated way. The findings of this research show that various government agencies in Iran collect and publish the related statistics on the effects of climate change on the economic and ordinary lives of people but these statistics are not available in the Iran statistical Yearbook. This paper recommends that the NSOs in every country should take the responsibility of harmonizing and mobilizing the available statistical resources in their countries and make the needed arrangement among the stakeholders responsible for collecting and disaggregating data on the climate change indicators. It’s suggested that every country should have a National Strategy for Development of Statistics. This strategy can be a road map determining the duties of concerned agencies responsible for producing the statistics on the Sustainable Development Goals indicators. Moreover, this national strategy acts like a guideline for production and dissemination of official statistics needed by national and international users by full consideration of the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics and using state-of-the-art technologies and modern methodologies, especially register-based methods.