Sharing best practices blueprints
for climate action

Based on a public-private partnership with software company, cBrain A/S, The Danish Environmental Protection Agency (DEPA) has developed a new paradigm for digital environmental governance, allowing for an accelerated approach to digitalization.

cBrain commits to sharing blueprints for this best practice digital governance with environmental and water regulators. Their aim is to enhance and accelerate their ability to close the time gap between a political decision and its execution.

DEPA has in total approximately 250 processes. Among these are 45 processes related to grants and 90 processes related to inspections and environmental policing. The remaining relate to license and permitting.

For several years, the partners have been working to develop models and software based on best practices to accelerate processing the agency’s work while reducing the costs of administration and enabling transparency. This has included supporting work processes end-to-end, from self-services for citizens and companies, to case processing and filing, thereby reducing workload, ensuring compliance, and eliminating fraud. This has led to measurable results in reduced administration costs, improved citizen services, fraud prevention and increased transparency.

As a first step, the partners have used formalized methods to analyze government best practices and develop generic process models and standards, describing different types (“classes”) of government climate and environmental processes. By taking these processes as the starting point for the work, the aim has been to understand and describe government best practices within digitalized working environments, while avoiding the limitations of specific technologies.

Standards and best practices can accelerate the deployment of governmental climate and environment programs.

As part of our commitment to SDG 6 and SDG 13, we will donate and publicly share the technologically neutral standards and best practices below.

All over the world environmental authorities are under pressure to bring down the consent time for environmental permitting. Environmental Impact Assessments safeguard natural resources, prevent pollution and loss of biodiversity as well as ensuring due process and transparency for people affected by it.

Environmental permitting follows international standards making reuse of best practice a very viable opportunity.

Wastewater management targets a broad range of efforts that promote effective and responsible water sanitation, hygiene, wastewater treatment and wastewater disposal.

This blueprint focuses on wastewater inspections. It is important to note that the principles and best practices developed can be applied to other inspection processes. The inspection process is a critical aspect of ensuring that regulations are adhered to and that public health and environmental safety are protected.