About ENVINA Denmark
The Danish Association on Environment, Nature and Planning

ENVINA is an organisation for persons employed in the public sector - at local, regional or national level concerning the environment, nature or planning.

The organisation is a merge of the former FMK Denmark (since 1986) together with the former organisation MINA (since 1955) as a result of a governmental decided structure change in Denmark by 1st of January 2007 where 270 municipalities were merged into 98 lager municipalities and 13 regional counties ceased to exist and 5 new regional and bigger counties were established. The state level has taken over some of the responsibilities which formerly did rely at the regional level - and a main part of the former regional responsibilities have been handed over to the local level in regard to environment and nature protection as well as planning.

The Danish organisation ENVINA was established at a general assembly 13.12.2006 by which date FMK Denmark and MINA ceased to exist.
Membership of ENVINA is open for all professionals employed at local, regional and national level. They need to be employed in authority positions. Professionals from the private sector cannot become member. But ENVINA do co-operate with the private sector.

ENVINA has approx. 2700 members.

The chairman and the executive committee are elected by the members at an annual general meeting, held in spring, and with about 500 - 700 members present. The committee constitutes itself with a deputy chairman, secretary and three private members. All these people (6) are doing this on an honorary basis without any payment.

The backbone of ENVINA are a range of specialist groups. All specialist groups are open to participation by any of the members of the organisation. Their efforts are to gather and share knowledge, to distribute information about new knowledge to all members of ENVINA, and to arrange days to exchange knowledge and experience between members. Our authority area covers most of Environmental Health disciplines - some of those are: Drinking Water quality, Pest Control (Rats extermination), Air pollution - both in general - as from industrial pollution, preventing pollution of soil, noise pollution, sewage water, inspection of enterprises, permitting - both national legislation as well as EU IED (Industrial Emission Directive - permitting) - Rivers, Watercourses, lakes and the sea, Emergency planning - both Public Health as well as Environment, Disaster Risk Reduction planning. The only area, that the ENVINA do not cover is food inspection. This is covered by our national food inspection authorities.

The Danish law system on environmental and nature protection and spatial planning is based on acts made by the Parliament (in Danish: Folketinget), elected every 4 years by the people of Denmark (unless the Prime Minister chose to have an election earlier ). In fact most of the environmental and EH rules are now for real made by decision by EU, and afterwards implemented as Danish acts and regulations. In terms of Environmental Health - EH - Environmental Health is an integrated part of any environmental protection officers, nature or planning officers daily work - as public health is at the forefront in the Danish Environmental legislation. But just as well EH is an integrated part in all planning and also per example in the regulation of building constructions etc.  This has been the case since WWII - and in terms of housing standards etc. most of housing related public health problems have almost vanished. But of course a few bad examples can be found still. Due to the raising living and housing conditions since the 1950es more attention has been paid to the overall living conditions in terms of both food inspection but also the general environmental impact on human living conditions due to pollution from industrial and farming activities - the interaction between the overall environment and human living - and a shift back to the importance of wild nature and to raise new woods - which is also in order to protect our natural ground water resources.

The environmental and nature protection acts are constructed in a way, so that executing them, is a matter for the local and national authorities primarily.
We have had particular acts on environmental protection since October 1974, and even before that, we had local regulations on public health.
Every Danish municipality - as well as at national level is forced to build up a department with people educated as biologists, engineers or similar education's, all employed to work on environment and nature protection.

You can find more information about ENVINA at our Website: www.envina.dk
Until now unfortunately only in Danish.

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