New Year's Report 25/26

2025 was the year when Danmarks Miljøportal delivered its journeyman's piece in the form of development and operation of the central system for Green Tripartite "MARS". A system that has been praised by Jeppe Bruus, the Danish Agriculture and Food Council, the Danish Society for Nature Conservation and the municipalities.  

With MARS, Danmarks Miljøportal established itself as the organization that can provide the system support for the major reform quickly, efficiently and user-friendly, with subsequent safe operation and further development. It shows the way for what Danmarks Miljøportal can do in relation to future major reforms in other major areas such as climate adaptation, nature restoration, drinking water protection, environmental approvals and circular economy.  

Collaboration at the centre 

MARS showed what it means to be a joint public partnership: a place where data, professionalism and technology meet and be translated into concrete action for the green transition. 

Today, we stand on a foundation that is carried by more than 150 organizations and around 4,000 professionals who contribute data, knowledge and commitment every day.  The strength of the Environmental Portal lies in the joint public collaboration between the state, regions, municipalities, utilities, knowledge institutions and other data owners. Where, in order to make the collaboration work optimally, we have developed one of Denmark's strongest and most modern IT organizations.  Where we show that the same IT and data foundation can be used across many of the environmental challenges we face. 

Danmarks Miljøportal is not one organization: it is a partnership. And it is precisely in the field of tension between different disciplines, authority roles and perspectives that the quality of our solutions arises. When a municipality registers data, a government agency sets standards, and a company, consultant or citizen uses data in practice, it is the same common data set that binds us together. It is this shared infrastructure that makes it possible to work efficiently and cohesively across sectors. 

A fully operational digital ecosystem

The use of Miljøportalen's solutions has been significant in 2025. Over half a million direct users have been in our systems, and when we count the indirect end users (e.g. advisors, citizens and companies), we reach over two million. At the same time, 76 GB of environmental data was reported via our professional systems during the year, while more than 300 TB of data was downloaded through our solutions  

The figures tell their own story: Danmarks Miljøportal is not just an archive, but an active ecosystem for the day-to-day environmental and climate management. Our data catalogue now contains 1,185 datasets, which were extracted more than 3.3 million times via APIs during the year, and Arealdata.dk alone provided 287 TB of data to users.  This is data that is used for everything from local planning and environmental assessments to major national initiatives. 

Green Tripartite 

As mentioned, MARS was launched in 2025. Specifically in January, but we have since upgraded MARS with new features every six weeks. MARS has been developed for the Danish Agency for Green Area Conversion.  MARS has been the central working tool for the local tripartites and the restructuring plans they had to deliver. With 8,380 sketch projects created, and more than 138,000 unique sessions testify that the platform has become a central work tool 

MARS is not the only project Danmarks Miljøportal has been involved in on Green Tripartite.  We have worked with KL to define the data that the municipalities consider to be the most important in Green Three Tripartite. KL has been responsible for the dialogue with over 200 municipal representatives, while we have delivered the IT and data platform. In the TRANSFORM project, supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, we have worked to exhibit the research results that the researchers came up with. In addition, we have developed a prototype of a Synergikort, where different area interests can be prioritized against each other.  

The Green Tripartite requires the conversion of 15% of the total Danish agricultural area in order to achieve environmental gains. It is such a big task that no organization can succeed with it alone. Therefore, we are pleasedthat so many organizers have seen Danmarks Miljøportal as a central partner they want to collaborate with.  

Coherent solutions across disciplines 

One of the major movements in 2025 has been the work of tying our many systems closer together. With The Great User Journey, users can now move from miljoeportal.dk to Danmarks Arealinformation, on to Kemidata and Artsdata beta, without losing context, location or drawn polygons.  

At the same time, the professional groups have delivered an impressive job of further developing the individual subject areas. On water, soil, groundwater, nature, rats, data sharing and environmental assessments, both data quality, user-friendliness and functionality have been significantly strengthened. 

A common foundation 

All this could not be done without the close interaction between professional groups, data owners, authorities, knowledge organisations and companies. The way in which thousands of professionals register, quality assure and use data every day is the very backbone of Danmarks Miljøportal. That is also why we owe a big thank you to all of you who contribute, both in the daily work and in the joint professional forums. 

2026 will build on this foundation. We are facing new development phases for, among other things, Green Tripartite, groundwater and drinking water, earth moving, digital environmental approvals, the Marine Nature Fund, climate adaptation and construction waste. So we strengthen the data foundation, use it for decision support for land use planning and contribute to efficient management. The ambition is clear: to make it even easier to translate environmental data into knowledge and action. 

An important element in exploiting these potentials will be artificial intelligence. EA-Hub was the first AI solution we launched and we can see it has been used extensively. In 2025, with support from the Entrepreneur Package, the Agency for Digitisation will have additional solutions for dialogue with data, guidance archives and easier search for data using syntheticmetadata. The development is fast. In 2026, we will seek out collaborations so that we can combine our AI focus on targeted and understandable data for an applicant or caseworker with the initiatives of others. We believe that artificial intelligence will change the entire system landscape in the environmental field within the next five years, which requires new collaborations on joint software development of AI components. 

Thank you for a strong 2025. I look forward to continuing the joint work in 2026 to develop Denmark's digital foundation for environmental data.  No organization can succeed alone, but when we pull together and think across the board, we can achieve great results. 

Happy New Year. 

Nils Høgsted 
Director, Danmarks Miljøportal