The Arab region suffers from pressing environmental challenges such as water scarcity, desertification, land degradation and reduction in arable land areas, which negatively impact access to food especially in rural and marginalized areas. Since more than a decade, ESCWA works closely in partnership with the League of Arab States (LAS) and UN Environment on sustainable development issues including provision of adequate tools to monitor and assess the environmental dimension of the 2030 Agenda. 

On 4 and 5 April ESCWA held the 12th session of its Statistical, at the UN House, Beirut. The meeting launched the first Arabic-language Gender Statistics Toolkit and eLearning module.
 

The Working Group aims to achieve the following goals:
1. To agree upon on the regional positions on the items for discussion and decision of the fifty-second session of the UN Statistical Commission to be transmitted on behalf of the Arab region;
2. To discuss any other issues related to the development of official statistics in the Arab region.

Following the last EGM held on 14-15 September 2019 in Tunis; ESCWA’s Libya SED integrated, as agreed, the set of broad arrays of priorities which were identified by the authors of the papers and discussants into thematic areas which encapsulated the harmonization of these priorities in the agenda below.
 
The opening session of the meeting will present the progress made so far, the challenges encountered, and upcoming planned activities. It will help participants familiarize (and engage) themselves further with the project’s mission and stages.
 
The objective of the following sessions of the meeting in the agenda which will be led by ESCWA moderators and Libyan discussants will be aimed at having a detailed discussion and exchange feedback and comments on the draft developed integrated thematic areas and their components and solidify their content and to discuss and exchange their views and provide their feedback on the overall thematic areas which will then be the basis for drafting discussion papers in preparation for the dialogue sessions beginning of year 2020. These sessions will also feature miscellaneous additional recommendations that need further consideration that could benefit the Libya project and feed into the socioeconomic and governance aspects of the future work to be done.