Europe’s sustainable public procurement ambition has a measurement problem. The data to fix it already exists.

This article was first published on the IISD website.

Public procurement across the European Union (EU) flows through ambitious new data platforms, but the data still cannot tell us whether green procurement is reducing emissions. New analysis from OCP and IISD demonstrates that it can be done, using data that governments are already collecting.

Globally and across the EU, public procurement is a powerful policy lever available to governments in their transition to a low-carbon economy. It is a force capable of shaping entire markets, incentivizing green technologies, and driving down emissions in high-carbon industries. 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.

Yet, ask any government today whether its procurement is actually delivering on those ambitions—in tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) avoided, not in boxes ticked—and the honest answer is: we don’t know. The data infrastructure to change that is now emerging. In September 2024, the European Commission launched the Public Procurement Data Space (PPDS), a platform that for the first time 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. With EU procurement reform now gaining momentum, the window to close the gap between green ambition and action is open. Using data already flowing through the PPDS, we tested whether that gap can be closed without creating new reporting burdens. This article explains what is already possible, where the bottlenecks are, and what the EU should do now.

Measuring intent, not impact

The way green public procurement (GPP) is currently monitored is telling. Most systems, including the European Commission’s PPDS, track whether a contracting authority declared an environmental objective. The “strategic procurement” dashboard reports the share of procurement procedures tagged as ‘‘reduction of environmental impacts.’’ It does not, and currently cannot, tell you whether those procedures reduced emissions or led to any other impacts.

To understand the gap, it helps to think about GPP monitoring in three layers. The first is institutionalization: whether the right policies and tools are in place, such as national action plans, criteria libraries, and training for buyers. The second is outputs, or procurement activity: how many tenders included environmental criteria, in which sectors, and at what value. Most monitoring systems, including the PPDS, operate at this level. The third layer is about actual environmental outcomes: tonnes of CO₂ avoided, water conserved, materials diverted from landfill, and energy saved. 

Source: Erizaputri, Bechauf, and Casier, 2024

The latter is what ultimately matters for understanding real progress on procurement’s contribution to climate policy, and unfortunately, measurement at this level remains very limited today. This is not a minor technical limitation. It is a fundamental constraint on the evidence base that governments and the European Commission need to make informed decisions. Without knowing whether green public procurement is delivering real-world results, governments cannot scale what works, fix what does not, or convince suppliers to take environmental requirements seriously. 

The result is a missed opportunity of significant scale. Public procurement has the buying power to drive market transformation. But without the tools to measure its impact, it functions more as a checkbox exercise than a strategic instrument. 

The data to start fixing this already exists

The OCP and IISD recently examined this question more closely.  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, crucially, without imposing new reporting burdens on contracting authorities.

We focused our pilot on two sectors that have high-volume procurement and are strategically central to Europe’s climate agenda: construction works (linked to the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, and relevant to the Construction Products Regulation and Industrial Accelerator Act) and vehicles (linked to the Clean Vehicles Directive). We used German contract award data as our test case. For each contract, we looked at how much was spent and applied known figures for how much CO₂ that sector typically produces per euro spent. This approach—known as spend-based estimation—is not the most precise method available, but it is the only one that works with the data currently flowing through the PPDS, which lacks the detailed quantity and unit information that more accurate methods would require.

What follows is an overview of what the current PPDS gave us to work with. It reveals the current state of structured data, what is achieved today, and most importantly, the scale of the opportunity currently left untapped.

Source: Authors’ compilation

We started with 2.5 million procurement rows available in the PPDS. The full PPDS dataset covers the period of July 2018 to December 2025. However, the analysis relied on data downloaded directly from TED due to missing variables in PPDS. The TED notices used for Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV) 34 (vehicles) cover October 2023 to January 2026 and for CPV 45 (construction works) October 2023 to March 2026.

Because almost no contracts included data on quantities or units—for example, how many vehicles were bought or how many square meters were built—we could only use contract values to estimate emissions. Even for this method, missing and inconsistent sub-classification fields meant that isolating the specific contracts relevant to each sector required aggressive filtering: the usable motor vehicle sample shrank to just 125 contracts, and the construction sample 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. 

What the numbers tell us

In the construction works sector, public procurement already tagged with green criteria delivers an estimated saving of more than 42 million kg of CO₂e relative to a conventional construction baseline. That is a meaningful contribution, but it represents only a fraction of what is possible.

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.

The motor vehicles sector tells a similar story. Assuming that only battery electric vehicles are bought under GPP, applying green criteria to the rest of our vehicle sample would have yielded an additional saving more than five times larger than what the existing green-tagged contracts already 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. And we can begin to see it—and measure it—using data that governments are already collecting.

A solvable problem, not an insurmountable one

The data gaps we identified are real, but they are not insurmountable. The chain that connects data to impact is straightforward: better data creates visibility into what procurement is actually delivering; visibility enables accountability for buyers, policy-makers, and suppliers; accountability drives more ambitious and consistent application of green criteria; and more green procurement translates into real environmental impact—lower emissions, less waste, and more sustainable use of resources. Closing the data gaps is therefore not a technical nice-to-have—it is a prerequisite for public procurement to be the strategic lever everyone expects it to be. Progress toward EU-wide environmental impact tracking does not require rebuilding procurement data systems from scratch. It requires targeted, proportionate improvements to what already exists. Specifically, our analysis points to two concrete actions that could substantially improve the analytical power of the PPDS without requiring changes to the existing data collection infrastructure. 

• First, the use of environmental objective tags in eForms, particularly the “Reduction of environmental impacts” designation, should be clarified through binding guidance so that it is applied consistently across member states.
• Second, for procedures that are already flagged as environmentally strategic, item-level data should be strengthened. This means making structured reporting of quantities, units, and additional classification codes mandatory, using controlled vocabularies aligned with procurement classification codes.

The path from the current state to routine EU-wide environmental impact monitoring is incremental rather than transformational. What it requires is not new technology or new reporting systems (at least not immediately), but disciplined use of the infrastructure that European institutions and member states have already built, combined with the tools to turn that data into useful policy insight.

We propose a phased implementation roadmap. 

In the short term, impact tracking should be extended to a limited set of high-impact priority sectors beyond vehicles and construction, such as computers and energy efficiency, using methodologies that rely on already available structured data: product classification codes, contract values, and buyer country. This phase should prioritize testing and refining the methodology using existing PPDS datasets.

In the medium term, impact indicators should be introduced within the PPDS as experimental “beta” dashboards, clearly labelled as estimates and accompanied by plain explanations of how they were calculated. During this phase, member states can be encouraged rather than required to strengthen item-level data for procedures with explicit environmental objectives, including more detailed product classifications and structured reporting of quantities and units.

In the long term, once data completeness and consistency are sufficiently improved, environmental impact indicators can become core PPDS outputs, supporting routine policy monitoring, benchmarking, and evaluation of Green Public Procurement targets at both EU and national levels.

Source: Authors’ compilation

An invitation to act

The procurement data infrastructure to track public spending in Europe is in place. And the methodology to measure real-world impact has been demonstrated. What is needed now is the commitment from the European Commission, the European Parliament, and EU member states to close the gap between the data being collected today and the insight it could generate by scaling these approaches across Europe, embedding impact tracking into the PPDS and national procurement ecosystems, and equipping public buyers with the tools to see and improve the environmental performance of their spending. When reforming the EU’s procurement rules, monitoring the results must not be an afterthought. Every euro of public spending has environmental consequences, whether or not they are measured. The question is whether governments choose to know those consequences and act on that knowledge.
 

The detailed technical report with the data and methodology used for this analysis is available upon request. Contact: [email protected]