Naturvårdsverket

Key successes

• Ensuring environmental data is more reliable and easier to use
• Enabling companies to report on their environmental performance easily and accurately
• Automating processes, freeing up time for case officers and companies
• Launched new digital services for producer’s liabilities in 2019, with many more areas to come in 2020

A fractured system means duplicated effort

Naturvårdsverket is working to attain global, European Union (EU) and national environmental targets, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Together with local and regional authorities, it also oversees the environmental compliance of businesses.

As concern about climate change and other sustainability issues grows, the reporting requirements on businesses are increasing for everything from air emissions to recycling. So it’s even more important that digital services ease the administrative burden, especially as the EU “Once only principle” states that businesses and citizens should not need to submit the same data more than once.

The architecture for managing environmental legislation had evolved piecemeal across many different authorities, often with new digital services developed for every new piece of legislation. This meant businesses have to submit the same data multiple times to different tiers of government. This threatened the quality of data, as well as organisations’ ability to keep track of it.

Reusing technology, only better

Naturvårdsverket’s transformation programme is delivering digital solutions that enable the sharing of data between different levels of government while creating components that many applications can reuse. We’re helping them bridge organisational siloes, and share processes and systems across functions. Businesses’ data can now exist in one place, not several, meaning the data can be collected and reported easily. The solutions also can connect with other public organisations, like the national business registry, to ensure the data is of high quality and only collected once from companies.

Together with Naturvårdsverket, we developed a scalable IT architecture that can grow and adapt with evolving legislation. We’ve also helped develop consistent processes for handling data across the organisation in line with legal requirements. With the structures in place, Naturvårdsverket will be launching more digital services through the coming years that will save businesses time and ensure environmental data is more reliable and easier to handle.