Progress report for
Sharing blueprints for digital water governance
Achievement at a glance
Since the Danish EPA in March 2023 donated the blueprints on best practices for digitizing the processes related to environmental permitting, wastewater inspections and drinking water protection to the UN Water Action Agenda, cBrain A/S has worked globally to re-emphasize the need to reduce the time gap between political decision-making and implementation by accelerating processes such as those related to permitting in order to achieve the SDGs. At the 2023 COP28 in Dubai, cBrain A/S hosted a side-event with participants from the Middle East, the EU and Denmark on environmental permitting to highlight the need for collaboration and accelerated decision-making.Furthermore, cBrain A/S has been building upon the existing knowledge of the models and analysis contained in the donated blueprints to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. The AI component – trained on a subset of Danish cases – can enhance and facilitate the work of a caseworker who often compares existing and new applications as well as assist the applicant with examples of similar applications and show how they have mitigated risks towards the environment in a project. The contents of the blueprints, coupled with AI, has sparked global interest. In October 2023, both the Danish EPA and cBrain A/S were invited to the White House Council on Environmental Quality to a Permitting Technology and Data Summit where the AI-driven process solutions were presented to representatives of the Biden-Harris Administration and US Congress.
cBrain A/S has also continuously been highlighting its commitment to deploy the necessary technical expertise to water regulators on national, state, or local level, who wish to adapt the best practice water governance developed in Denmark to their own regulatory environment aiming to provide accelerated access to digitization of their administration.
Next Steps
Morten OstergaardBeneficiaries
The regional beneficiaries of this commitment are primarily situated in Africa, Europe, Asia & Pacific, North America and Latin America and the Caribbean. More specifically, the current countries that are benefitting from the commitment are Australia, Denmark, Germany, Ghana, Great Britain, Guyana, Kenya, Romania, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, the United States of America. Other beneficiaries include state and local water authorities and environmental regulators.
Actions
As part of its original commitment, cBrain A/S has made the blueprints for best digital water governance publicly available for consultation. These can be accessed on https://cbrain.com/blueprint.cBrain A/S has published a peer-reviewed article for the 9th United Nations Multi-stakeholder Forum on Science, Technology, and Innovation for the SDGs (May 2024). The paper entitled “Strengthening government institutions to deliver on the SDGs: How digital transformation can enhance democratic institutions and public governance” demonstrates how strong digital bureaucracy and digitalization of decision-making processes, can serve as a vehicle for governments to deliver on their promises of realizing the SDGs, which is also at the core of the donated blueprints.