Czech Environmental Information Agency celebrates its 20th birthday today. During its development, it has emerged as a powerful data base and highly professional service agency of the Ministry of the Environment, providing validated data and information in the field of the environment, providing mapping services and managing and operating a number of information systems. It provides the technical infrastructure for the fulfilment of reporting obligations, deals with waste and circular management issues and carries out assessment activities in the field of integrated prevention. It cooperates with all providers of data sources in the Ministry of the Environment as well as with a number of research, scientific and university institutions. In the Czech Republic, CENIA is the contact point for the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe INSPIRE.
The history of the Agency dates back to the 1970s. The first predecessor of CENIA is considered to be Computational and Experimental Laboratory (VEL), which was transformed into Rationalisation and Experimental Laboratory (REL) on 18 December 1972, which operated a mainframe computer and dealt with machine time sales and programming.
Shortly after the creation of the Ministry of Environment in January 1990, Centre for Environmental Information (CEI) was created from REL and given the task of creating a Unified Environmental Information System in the Czech Republic. Its major activity from the very beginning was the publication of the Environmental Yearbook, which was expanded in 1996 into the Czech-English Statistical Yearbook of the Environment.
On April 1, 1992, CEI was transformed into Czech Ecological Institute (CEU), again with the mission to create a Unified Information System on the Environment. In addition, a number of other tasks were added: environmental education and awareness, voluntary instruments for environmental protection, environmental economics, environmental impact assessment, environmental risks and others. The CEU prepared documents for the state environmental policy and was one of the first departments in the country to introduce e-mail and the Internet. The establishment of the Agency for Integrated Pollution Prevention (IPPC) and the Integrated Pollution Register (IPR) became a significant extension of the CEU’s remit.
On 1 April 2005, CENIA, Czech Environmental Information Agency, was established from the CEU by decision of the Minister of the Environment. The abbreviation CENIA was derived from the English transliteration of the name of the Agency – Czech ENvironmental Information Agency. The logo in the form of a dandelion describes the main motto of the Agency – to be a centre of information that has a solid foundation but is easily disseminated. CENIA’s main mission has become the collection, evaluation and interpretation of environmental information and its provision to the professional and lay public.
In 2021, the organisation changed its name to Czech Environmental Information Agency and in 2023 it underwent a restructuring that set the direction for more efficient use of resources and better performance of priority tasks, including waste data, IPPC, REACH, reporting obligations of private entities and data collection on the development of individual environmental components.
We thank all colleagues and collaborators and look forward to further cooperation.
