IISD: Gov Data is Key for EU Sustainable Procurement Success
Despite public procurement being a powerful policy lever for governments in Europe – particularly when it comes to their transitions to a low-carbon economy – the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) identifies the data gap limiting governments from truly knowing whether green procurement is reducing emissions.
“The political ambition is real: the Paris Agreement, the European Green Deal, the Clean Vehicles Directive, the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, and many others place explicit expectations on public buyers to procure greener goods and services,” says the IISD.
The data infrastructure to create a single analytical environment
In September 2024, the European Commission launched the Public Procurement Data Space (PPDS). This platform brings together procurement data from Tenders Electronic Daily (TED), the official online platform for all EU procurement notices and national systems into a single analytical environment.
Using data already flowing through the PPDS, the IISD tested whether the gap between green ambition and action can be closed without creating new reporting burdens.
Current Green public procurement (GPP) monitoring tracks declared environmental intentions, not actual results. While systems like the PPDS record procedures tagged with environmental objectives, they cannot confirm whether emissions were reduced or if other outcomes were achieved. Monitoring must evolve beyond outputs to measure real-world impact — CO₂ avoided, water conserved, energy saved etc.
Does the data already exist?
Existing procurement data, currently flowing through the PPDS and TED ecosystems, could already be used to estimate the environmental impact of public procurement, without imposing new reporting burdens on contracting authorities.
A pilot by OCP and IISD tested this using German contract award data across two sectors central to Europe's climate agenda: construction works and vehicles.
“Our starting hypothesis was that the data needed to measure the environmental impact of public procurement is, to a large extent, already being collected; it is simply not being used for that purpose. We examined whether the procurement data already flowing through the PPDS and [TED] data ecosystems could be combined with established environmental impact modelling approaches to generate meaningful estimates of carbon emissions and potential savings
OCP and IISD applied spend-based estimation — calculating CO₂ emissions by combining contract values with known emissions figures per euro spent. While not the most precise approach, it is the only one compatible with current PPDS data, which lacks the quantity and unit detail required for more accurate methods.
Starting with 2.5 million procurement rows, data quality issues significantly limited usable samples for both construction and vehicles. As a result, the usable vehicle sample shrank to just 125 contracts and construction to 5,623 records.
“This is a direct reflection of the current state of structured procurement data across the EU, and it is precisely the gap this analysis sets out to make visible,” says the IISD.
The findings
In construction, publicly procured contracts already tagged with green criteria deliver an estimated saving of more than 42 million kg of CO₂e compared to a conventional baseline.
“When we modelled what would happen if all procurement were tagged as green in our sample (the overwhelming majority of the spend), the estimated additional savings reached approximately 898 million kg CO₂e. That is more than 21 times the savings currently achieved by the green-tagged contracts,” explains the IISD.
The vehicles sector shows a similar pattern. Applying green criteria to the remaining vehicle sample, assuming battery electric vehicle procurement, would yield savings more than five times larger than what existing green-tagged contracts currently deliver.
“These figures are illustrative, not definitive. But even as order-of-magnitude estimates, they make a powerful point: the environmental potential embedded in public procurement is vastly larger than what current green procurement practices are unlocking,” says IIS.
What’s next?
The data gaps identified are real but solvable. Better data creates visibility into procurement outcomes; visibility enables accountability; accountability drives more consistent application of green criteria; and more green procurement delivers real environmental impact.
Closing these gaps is therefore a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have, for procurement to function as a genuine strategic lever.
This means scaling impact tracking approaches across Europe, embedding them into the PPDS and national procurement ecosystems and equipping public buyers with tools to monitor and improve the environmental performance of their spending.
