The Conference 

Under the motto Indicators for territorial policies: closing data gaps by using traditional and new sources and methods, the 2016 SCORUS Conference aims to address the development and progress of regional and urban statistics under the scope of the cross-cutting issues that have been put forward in European and global agendas.

The territorial dimension has been set out as essential for the implementation of EU regional policy, aligned with Europe 2020 strategy, and new instruments were designed in order to reinforce place-based policies through cross-sectoral coordination of policies and multi-level governance from local to European level. Within the new 2014-2020 programming cycle specific needs of information, including at a detailed territorial level, arise for regional policy monitoring and evaluation.

New information needs arise to measure the multi-dimensionality of well-being where people live (see the OECD’s work on measuring well-being: How’s life in your region?) and to monitor progress of societies towards global objectives, such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), not only at the national level but also in different rural and urban territories. A recent topic of discussion within OECD’s Working Party on Territorial Indicators are the possibilities emerging from alternative data sources, namely the ones resulting from open data initiatives for increasing and improving territorial indicators.

Additionally, the European Committee on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM: Europe) is paying special attention to promote the benefits of statistical and geospatial data integration to address SDGs monitoring as well as national and regional policies. In this vein, the upcoming United Nations Conference of European Statisticians in April 2016 will also discuss the benefits of linking environmental and socioeconomic attributes to location attributes and of improving geospatial reference frameworks to increase the scope of territorial information for policy purposes.

In this context, the ESS Vision 2020 recognizes that there is an increasing need for territorial based information that is not limited to a greater segmentation of traditional indicators, but that extends to the need to provide information according to relevant analytical territorial units and to have new metrics based on the integration of geospatial and statistical data.

The 2016 SCORUS Conference aims to be an opportunity to discuss the place of territorial statistics within the scope of the strategic challenges set up by the EU, OECD and UN agendas that include the use of administrative data, of geospatial information analysis and modeling, of multi-source statistics, open data and big data so as to produce relevant indicators for the monitoring of territorial policies.