1. Introduction, Danish Environmental Protection Agency

Danish Environmental Assistance and Environmental Conventions

1. Introduction

The Danish Parliament recently stressed that Denmark must strengthen its efforts to implement environmental agreements in partner countries. This happened with the unanimous adoption of a decision on environmental assistance (V79) on May 4, 1999, and V101 of May 22, 2000, on strengthening active work to support the implementation of environmental conventions.

The Danish Ministry of Environment and Energy has prepared and implemented a wide range of environmental assistance projects that relate to international conventions and agreements. This is the case in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Southern Africa and the Arctic region, and includes projects that relate to the Convention on Climate Change, the Montreal Protocol under the Vienna Convention, the Helsinki Convention, the Basel Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, the CITES Convention, the international forest recommendations and the World Heritage Convention. Activities so far have thus covered many areas of significant international interest to the work of the ministry but activities should be prioritised and strengthened further.

Denmark is an active participant in international environmental cooperation and is proactively building up an international society based on the rule of law. Denmark provides a significant amount of bilateral environmental assistance, both in relative and absolute terms. This is internationally acknowledged in the latest OECD evaluation of Danish environmental policy (April 1999).

This publication is meant for the staff of the ministry who work on a daily basis with international environmental agreements and those who administer environmental assistance programmes, i.e. DANCEE (Danish Cooperation for Environment in Eastern Europe), DANCED (Danish Cooperation for Environment and Development), DANCEA (Danish Cooperation for Environment in the Arctic) and the Sector Integrated Environmental Programmes – Energy (environmental assistance in the energy sector for the new democracies in the Baltic Sea Region).

The aim is to create a dynamic exchange, through which bilateral project cooperation continually develops in tandem with the development of Danish priorities in the multilateral environmental agreements and vice versa. In other words, the specific projects should reflect the Danish policy in the environmental sector, which, in turn should be inspired by the experiences from project cooperation and obtain the full political benefit of the resources applied in environmental assistance.

The publication is based on recent experience of actively linking environmental assistance to the implementation of international agreements in Danish legislation. This publication, therefore, outlines a systematic organisation of existing working methods, and introduces new tools and procedures developed on that basis.

It does not replace existing strategies such as e.g. "Strategy for a strengthened involvement in the chemicals sector", but is primarily a tool to be used by those in the ministry who administer environmental assistance and those who are involved in international conventions, in an ongoing dialogue with counterparties in partner countries.

Chapter two describes priority areas that could strengthen coherence between implementing conventions and environmental assistance. However, we can still carry on working in other areas, e.g. one such priority not included in this publication is the 1992 Rio Forest Declaration and subsequent global and regional recommendations on, for example, sustainable forestry. These result from as yet incomplete negotiations that also involve the issue of a Forest Convention. As the area of conventions is continuously developing, this publication will be revised every other year. However, updated information is always available at the web sites relating to the relevant conventions and the ministry’s technical divisions and institutions.

Chapter two also deals with global environmental problems and prioritised conventions. Chapter three briefly describes the countries cooperating with the Danish Ministry for Environment and Energy and the major environmental issues in these countries. The publication includes a series of tools and routines, and identifies the organisations responsible for their execution (see Chapter four). Chapter five describes in detail the specific conventions and requirements parties must meet and suggestions for possible environmental assistance measures. And finally, Chapter six briefly describes the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). GEF operates the financial mechanisms of the Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity.