Page 239 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 4

STS583 Daniel C.

Using GIS and Official Statistics to support
assessments of risk to sustainable development

from Environmental Degradation
Daniel Clarke
United Nations, ESCAP Statistics Division
1

Abstract
Modern methods for risk assessment, in the insurance industry, for example,
make use of a variety of sources of economic, social and environment statistics
for measurement of exposure, vulnerability and coping capacity in relation to
probabilities of future hazards. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk
Reduction and the UN Sustainable Development Goals recognizes
environmental hazards, associated with environmental degradation, as one of
the serious risks to sustainable development. Moreover, ecosystems in good
condition can boost resilience against potential hazards or other threats to
sustainable development. Ecosystem degradation as well as impacts of
hazards result together in losses of ecosystem services and increase countries'
vulnerability both from material and financial points of view. Based on
experience from conducting pilot tests of applications for geospatial data in
the Southeast Asia region, this study investigates how statistical evidence can
be integrated into environmental management policy-making, especially
through mitigating risks from environmental hazards and by quantifying the
exposure to potential hazards, in terms of population and financial exposure,
which could be used as an important input for conducting cost-benefit
analyses for environmental management and sustainable development
planning. Using GIS and grid-based assimilation of data to integrate a broad
range of datasets, exposure to potential environmental hazards are identified
in order to help design policies to counteract or reduce risks to the health an
sustainability of these communities. The results of this study include methods
for integrating official statistics with earth observation data, which could be
applied and adapted by national statistics agencies for sustainability
assessments at multiple scales.

Keywords
Environmental Management; Geographic Information Systems; Risk
Assessment; Official Statistics

1. Introduction
Use of geographic information system (GIS) technologies for integration
of official statistics with geospatial datasets, produced from remote sensing

1 any views expressed in this paper belong to the author only and in no way should be
interpreted as a position of the United Nations.
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