The 1st OECD Roundtable on Cities and Regions for the SDGs was held at the OECD Headquarters in Paris on 7 March 2019, within the scope of the OECD programme on A Territorial Approach to the SDGs. The Roundtable brought together cities, regions, national governments, international organisations, private sector and other key stakeholders to identify trends and challenges in the localisation of the SDGs, including the experiences and key findings from the pilots of the programme.

1. Measuring the SDGs in OECD
Regions and Cities
1st OECD Roundtable of Cities and Regions for SDGs - March 7, 2019
Paolo Veneri
OECD/CFE

2. Objectives
• Provide a framework for (and with) Regions and Cities to use an
SDG approach in policy making
• Collect and produce SDGs indicators for regions and cities by:
- maximising coverage and international comparability
- building on already existing OECD work
• Enhance the use and impact of indicators through a data
visualisation tool
On-going OECD work on measuring SDGs
progress in regions and cities

3. “SDG indicators should be disaggregated, where relevant, by income, sex, age,
race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability and geographic location” - IAEG-SDG
• Mapping the UN Global Indicator Framework for SDGs
– Building on the OECD Regional and Metropolitan databases (but not only)
– When UN indicator not available look for proxies (available or to produce)
• Which Regions and Cities?
– Regions: 400 OECD TL2 Regions + TL2 Regions of 5 LAC countries, 5 EU28 countries,
Tunisia and Russia
– Cities: about 650 OECD Functional Urban Areas (>250K population)
– TL3 and Administrative cities when easily available and relevant
What and at which subnational levels to measure?

4. • Beyond Goal 11 on “Cities and human settlements” and Goal 10
looking at “Inequalities within Countries”; many Targets and
Indicators have an important subnational component, such as:
– For being a competence/jurisdiction of Local/Subnational government
• 1.5.4 Local government implementing a disaster risk reduction strategy
• 5.5.1 Proportion of seats held by women in local governments
– Due to potential important regional disparities within and/or across
countries
• 1.2.1 People living in relative poverty
• 8.5.2 Unemployment rates, by sex and age
• 16.1.1 Homicides per 100,000 people
• 8.1.1 Annual growth rate of real GDP per capita
• 11.6.2 Exposure to air pollution (PM2.5)
Relevant SDG Targets and Indicators for OECD
Regions and Cities

5. Metropolitan database
Building on the existing database
- 650 metropolitan areas in OECD
countries
- Global city definition work: extending the
coverage to the globe
- Unique tool to compare cities across
countries
Regional database
- Annual data collection from OECD countries
- Large set of well-being indicators

6. Large disparities within countries in Relative poverty
rates for both Regions AND Cities
Regions
Cities
% of people with household income below half the national median household income, circa 2015

7. Bridging the data gaps
• Statistical questionnaire filled by countries
– Goal 3: Obesity rate
– Goal 4: Pupils and students enrolment
– Goal 5: Women victims of physical or sexual violence (%); Women Mayors (%)
– Goal 7: Final energy consumption per capita
– Goal 6: Population connected to at least secondary wastewater treatment (%)
• Modelled indicators from other sources (in progress)
– Goal 16, Feeling of Safety (%) (e.g. survey data)
– Goal 11, Growth in built-up area (e.g. global gridded data)
– Goals 14 and 15, protected terrestrial and maritime zones (i.e. World Database on
Protected Areas)

8. Example other sources: Grids and geospatial information
Average built-up area (square metres) per capita, 2014

9. OECD Visualisation tool
• Main objective
• Allowing citizens, policy-makers and other stakeholders to identify the
distance of their city to the SDGs in an intuitive and easy way
• Features
• Provides comparisons to peer regions or cities and national averages
• Allows regions and cities to identify alike peers with similar or better SDGs
outcomes
• Coverage
• Around 400+ OECD TL2 Regions and 600+ OECD FUAs
• Around 80 indicators for TL2 Regions; pending for Cities

10. Challenges ahead for SDG measurement at
subnational level
• Indicators’ coverage
• Relevance of available indicators for policy makers at
different levels (regional, metropolitan, municipal, etc.)
• Combining official indicators with modelled ones
• Lower data availability for cities

11. Thank you!
Contacts:
RegionStat@oecd.org
Paolo.VENERI@oecd.org
Visit the updated web-sites:
www.oecdregionalwellbeing.org
https://measuringurban.oecd.org/#