Abstract

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes several indicators that should be collected for cities or for rural and urban areas. The Action Framework of the Implementation of the New Urban Agenda and the Global Strategy to improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics both highlight the need for a harmonized method to facilitate international comparisons and to improve the quality of rural and urban statistics in support of development policies and investment decisions.

In recent years, six international organizations, the European Union, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Labour Office (ILO), the OECD, UN-Habitat and the World Bank have joined forces and developed a new method to delineate cities, urban and rural areas in a harmonized way. In 2020, the UN Statistical Commission endorsed this new method, called the Degree of Urbanisation. This new method based on a population grid allows for a harmonized comparison of urbanisation across the globe and facilitates international statistical comparisons of the performance of rural areas.

The session aims at presenting the challenges of implementing the definition at national and international level, as well as demonstrating the opportunities it offers in measuring Sustainable Development Goals. The session will also highlight potential extensions of the method to capture at higher granularity the urban-rural continuum. The session will include examples based on a large variety of data sources – official statistics, survey statistics, geospatial data, environmental statistics, etc.