Background

The United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations (UN/LOCODE) is a five-character classification system that provides a coded representation for the names of ports, airports, inland clearance depots, inland freight terminals and other cross-border trade and transport related locations (see UNECE Recommendation n°16). Governments and the international trade community use UN/LOCODE extensively for the movement of goods for trade. The UN/LOCODE supports global trade, for example, it is used in all trade documents and to facilitate the electronic exchange of trade information.

The development and maintenance of the UN/LOCODE is provided by UNECE jointly with the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) as a service to governments and the trade community in the framework of its trade facilitation mission. The UNECE secretariat publishes the UN/LOCODE directories twice a year and these are made available free of charge on the UNECE website.

In recent years, the use of the UN/LOCODE has been extended to new areas of trade, for example, to support maritime security and environmental protection. These developments are of particular interest to new stakeholders, such as the International Maritime Organization (IMO), Universal Postal Union (UPU), European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

In order to provide a supporting forum to the UN/LOCODE user community to capture business needs and discuss how to improve UN/LOCODE, UN/CEFACT has been organizing annual conferences since 2015.

Objective
The UN/LOCODE Conference 2017 provides the opportunity to bring together all stakeholders of the UN/LOCODE user community, including Government administrations, international organizations, private sector companies and their industry associations. The conference provides an opportunity to discuss the technological and strategic framework in which UN/LOCODE will be used in the future as well as issues related to the maintenance and further development of this standard.

The Conference on Thursday, 30 March 2017, is open to all interested stakeholders. It will focus on the experiences, lessons learned and the importance of harmonizing of UN/LOCODE at a national level, especially for implementing Single Windows. Additional uses of the UN/LOCODE in the maritime industry (e.g. for monitoring ship movement for maritime security) and in Port Community Systems will also be discussed. As decided at the 2016 conference, a study on UN/LOCODE business requirements is being conducted in order to re-engineer the UN/LOCODE system. The latest results of this study will be presented at the conference for discussion and comments.

Target audience

• Representatives from the UN/LOCODE user community, including public sector and private sector;
• UN/LOCODE national focal points from countries and institutional focal points from international organizations;
• UN/CEFACT experts; and
• Representatives from the Missions to the United Nations.

Contact
For further information on the conference, please contact Yan Zhang.

Downloads:

• Agenda
• PRESENTATIONS:
  Session 1: Information sharing on UN/LOCODE developments and follow-up on the last Conference
  - Report from the Secretariat (Ms. Yan Zhang, UNECE)
  - Demonstration of the Pilot Project with ESRI (Phase II) (Mr. Martin Engels, ESRI)
  Session 2: The harmonisation of UN/LOCODE for Single Window Implementation
  - Experiences shared by Brazil Tiago Spengler, Customs Administration of Brazil）
  - Experiences shared by Finland (Antti Arkima, Finnish Transport Agency）
  - Experiences shared by China（Yinfen Zhang, China National Institute of Standardization）
  - Experiences shared by Morocco（Amri Mohamed Anas, PORTNET）
  Session 3: UN/LOCODE in the maritime industry
  - Monitoring ship movements（Aidan Jennings, ITU ）
  - The use of UN/LOCODE in Cargo Community Systems (Christophe Reynaud, Marseille Gyptis International）
  - Bureau International des Containers et du Transport Intermodal (BIC) (Jorn Heerulff, Vice President)
  Special Session: The use of UN/LOCODE by the European Union (EU)
  - The use of UN/LOCODE by EMSA (Antti Arkima, on behalf of EMSA )
  - The use of UN/LOCODE by EUROSTAT (Georges Xenellis, EUROSTAT)