Procurement and impact

Procurement / By / June 22, 2022 / 2 minutes of reading

Procurement and impact

June 22, 2022
Procurement

Governments spend over 13tn USD a year with their suppliers, or around 15% of global GDP. We’ve started analysing the carbon intensity of public procurement. It is uncertain how much of our carbon is emitted through public procurement, but with a strong emphasis on infrastructure, transport, and military spending it is likely to be more than 15% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

There is a growing awareness that procurement professionals should consider these emissions in their purchasing activity, providing a challenge to suppliers to help them reduce their contracted emissions and set out how to make their own organisations carbon neutral. This might mean hospitals seeking to reduce beef in their catering contracts, or social housing teams demanding low carbon concrete in new homes. However, procurement teams face pressure to deliver savings which can require buyers to sign up to long-term contracts, effectively baking in emissions until the contract is re-let. Even a simple five-year contract now consumes one-sixth of the time that we have until the 2050 target for net-zero.

This puts greater pressure on procurement teams to use the moment of renewing a contract to specify lower-carbon alternatives. This is why our team has started experimenting with open procurement data to see if we can model the likely impacts of reducing emissions as contracts renew. Using data from the UK we’ve modelled different projections for the likely carbon emissions under different scenarios. Based on the data we have analysed, a twenty percent reduction at each renewal would see the UK government’s contracting still emitting 686,000 tonnes of carbon per month by 2030.

This is likely to be a significant underestimate, poor data quality meant that we were only able to evaluate 40% of the data that was published and further limitations on transparency mean that some contracts are not being published. Despite the limitations of our analysis, there’s increasing recognition by governments that they need to evaluate the carbon intensity of their supply chains and take a leading role in reducing the amount of carbon we emit.

The USA is committing to federal sustainability and the UK has set new targets for suppliers. Many other countries across the world are implementing new policies that will drive carbon out of our public supply chains, from Mexico to Lithuania and beyond our governments are getting ready for public procurement to go green. If the data is made public, we’ll be there to measure their progress.

Get in touch with us if you’d like to know more about our government procurement data and our API.

 

March 21, 2023

AUKUS Defence Procurement Deal

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joined the US President Joe Biden, and the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, in San Diego this...
Read more...
March 14, 2023

Australian Government Responds to COVID-19 Procurement Review

Many governments around the world have faced pressure regarding their procurement of COVID-19 treatments and vaccines, so it is encouraging to see...
Read more...
March 8, 2023

EU Joint Ammunition Procurement

EU ministers will meet today in Stockholm to decide whether to  jointly procure  ammunition to aid Ukraine and replenish domestic stockpiles. EU...
Read more...
March 7, 2023

Denial Of Service By Wall Of Text

Clarkesworld Magazine is a publisher of science fiction short stories. They accept and pay for submissions from anyone. As of last week,...
Read more...
March 1, 2023

Canadian Government Announces Rail Procurement Process

This week, the Canadian Government announced a major step in the procurement process for their High Frequency Rail project: the launch of...
Read more...
February 28, 2023

Deduplication Routines

Deduplication is a deceptively complex problem to handle at scale. There’s a simple, ugly and brutal way to do it, where you...
Read more...
February 23, 2023

Policy Proposal: Analysts In Place

Data is critical to the functioning of government. Policies and services live or die on the quality of data. Successes and failures...
Read more...
February 23, 2023

Hallucination As A Service

I asked Chat-GPT to find me some academic papers that highlight the usefulness of combining two different machine learning techniques. I hoped...
Read more...
February 20, 2023

Future Trends in Government Procurement

Over the years, government procurement has undergone significant changes, with new trends emerging that are reshaping the way governments buy goods and...
Read more...
February 15, 2023

Making Your Own Export Platform?

If you are building your own export platform, sourcing, organising and analysing your data has its challenges. Here are some of the...
Read more...
February 14, 2023

Tackling Modern Slavery in Supply Chains – Guidance

On 26 March 2020, the UK became the first country to publish a Government Modern Slavery Statement, setting out the steps government...
Read more...
February 8, 2023

Securing The Competitive Edge.

Are you an exporter looking for leads for your exporters? Do you want to help your in-country teams build more partnerships within...
Read more...
February 7, 2023

The Benefits of Data Tech 101

Government procurement, the process by which government entities purchase goods, services and works from private businesses, is being revolutionised by the integration...
Read more...
February 1, 2023

EU Awards New Gas Aggregation Contract

In December 2022, EU energy ministers agreed to create a platform for the collective demand aggregation and joint procurement of gas, with...
Read more...
January 25, 2023

Does Procurement Need Blockchain?

Blockchain is fundamentally a database, but rather than a database where one item is allowed to replace another, each change to the...
Read more...

Newsletter

Compelling research, insights and data directly into your inbox.

Recent media stories

Search

Recent articles