As part of the Clever Cities project, ICLEI is developing insights on effective public procurement practices for Nature Based Solutions (NBS). Working together with Frontrunner Cities and NBS Taskforce members, the team is developing case studies of good practice on the procurement of NBS. The findings will inform a report on the topic, which will be disseminated to Follower Cities through webinars and communication channels of the NBS Taskforce.

The overall aim of BUS-GoCircular is to address and overcome the challenges of the stimulation of demand for green energy skilled workforce, along with hands-on capacity building to increase the number of skilled workforce across the value chain. BUS-GoCircular will achieve this objective by developing and implementing a circular construction skills qualification framework with a focus on multifunctional green roofs, façades and interior elements. In addition, the project is strengthened by application of successful train-the-trainer methods and techniques for upskilling both demand and supply sides of the value chain involved. For stimulation of demand for sustainable energy skills, specific activities concerning companies, real estate, home owners and local authorities will be developed, including support towards legislative changes through circular green procurement and recognition of skills. Implementation will be carried out at country-specific and regional levels, based on a blend of measures to stimulate demand complimented with hands-on and practical upskilling of local and regional training capacity and workforce.

Based on the findings from the IMAILE project, which conducted a pre-commercial procurement of Personal Learning Environment software, the LEA project aims to develop a critical mass of European procurers demanding innovative learn tech solutions.

The Procure2Innovate project will establish or expand Competence Centres for innovation procurement in ten EU Member States. The project aims to improve institutional support and quality of advice for public procurers of information and communication technologies (ICT), and other product groups implementing innovation procurement.

On behalf of the EC, between March 2018 and September 2021 ICLEI developed an ambitious training programme to professionalise and scale up GPP on an EU-wide level. The training was carried out by local trainers in ten EU member states:
- Bulgaria by Center of Energy Efficiency (EnEffect)
- Croatia by Projekt jednako razvoj d.o.o. (PJR)
- Cyprus by Cyprus Energy Agency (CEA)
- Estonia by Baltic Environmental Forum Estonia
- Hungary by Business Economics Science Education Foundation (BESEF)
- Latvia by the Latvian Environmental Investment Fund (LEIF)
- Lithuania by Baltic Environmental Forum Lithuania
- Poland by Foundation CentrumCSR
- Portugal by Laboratório Nacional de Energia e Geologia (LNEG)
- Romania by Ecosistemi

The website is the first port of call for all things related to public procurement of innovation (PPI) and pre-commercial procurement (PCP). It aims to make public procurement of innovation a wide-spread reality in Europe.

The main idea behind the GPP Helpdesk is to promote and disseminate information about GPP, and to provide timely and accurate answers to stakeholders' enquiries. Stakeholders can send their questions by email to gpp-helpdesk@iclei.org

Part of the GPP Helpdesk service are the publication of monthly newsletters - GPP News-Alerts. Each News-Alert provides short articles, forthcoming GPP events, new website updates, an interview with a key stakeholder, and summaries of GPP examples. All editions are available here http://ec.europa.eu/environment/gpp/alert_en.htm

The European Commission (EC) will produce a report that collects good practices on socially responsible public procurement (SRPP), and ICLEI is are supporting the EC to identify these outstanding examples from local, regional, national and European buyers.
Buying social is about acquiring ethical products and services; using public tenders to promote decent work along the supply chain; introducing gender equality criteria or other social considerations in your tenders; using the light regime for social services, reserved contracts to encourage social outcomes, and accelerating inclusion of people with disabilities by including certain specifications in your tenders, among others.
ICLEI will also support a communication campaign - #WeBuySocialEU - to reach public procurers and authorities to share with them the advantages of SRPP and encourage them to invest time and money on it, and to reach social economy businesses to provide information on the possibilities of SRPP and facilitate their participation in public tendering.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), one of the fastest-growing technologies in recent years, has the potential to play a mission-driven role in cities’ climate action plans. The AI4Cities project aims to harness this potential by bringing together leading European cities looking for energy and mobility solutions to reduce GHG emissions and support their climate action commitments towards carbon neutrality. Helsinki (Finland), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Copenhagen (Denmark), Paris region (France), Stavanger (Norway) and Tallinn (Estonia) are the six European cities and regions involved in this project.

In AI4Cities, these six cities will go through a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) process. PCP is an innovation procurement tool to stimulate market innovation as it enables the public sector to steer the development of new solutions directly towards its needs.

In this context, the six cities will define the needs and requirements of the energy and mobility solutions to be developed, and challenge start-ups, SMEs and companies to design innovative solutions applying the use of AI and related enabling digital technologies, such as 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and big data applications.

The AI4Cities project is divided into five main phases (0-4): one preparatory phase (0), three standard PCP phases (1 – solutions design, 2 – prototype phase, and 3 – prototype testing phase) and one final impact assessment and follow up phase (4). A group of follower cities will be recruited throughout the project to enhance the market uptake of the developed solutions.

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) is supporting a SAICM project on global best practices for emerging chemical policy issues of concern. The project overarchingly aims to achieve the sound management of chemicals throughout their lifecycle by 2020 and sound management of chemicals and waste beyond 2020.
UNEP and ICLEI Europe are working jointly on supporting implementation of component 2 of the project, and in particular the activities in the electronics sector. These activities aim to help governments and value chain actors in the electronics sector track and manage chemicals of concern (CoC) in their products. This work is focussed on developing global sustainable public procurement guidance enabling purchasers to ultimately reduce the use of chemicals of concern (CoC) in the electronics sector and supporting the training for adaptation of global tools and guidance to the local context of public purchasers in Colombia.

The OECD is launching a new project to support selected cities/regions in using public procurement as a strategic tool to achieve their policy objectives and priorities. The project will be implemented with the support of ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability. It is open to ICLEI members, Global Lead City Network on Sustainable Procurement and Procura+ Participants as well as other cities ICLEI works with on this topic. The project comes at a time when public procurement is playing an increasingly critical role in delivering the goods and services that are necessary to fight the Covid-19 pandemic and prepare for post-crisis recovery.

In addition to providing support to selected cities and regions, the project offers the opportunity to produce comparative data and statistics on public procurement in cities and regions, facilitate peer-to-peer learning, and assess the procurement performance at the local level.

For more information on how your city/region can join the project, please contact Mark Hidson, Global Director, ICLEI’s Sustainable Procurement Centre (procurement@iclei.org) and Soo-Jin Kim, Head of Urban Policies and Reviews Unit, OECD (Soo-Jin.KIM@oecd.org).

As a unique smart city initiative from the European Commission, the Intelligent Cities Challenge (ICC) will provide its participants with technical support and knowledge-sharing opportunities to develop and implement smart action plans around 11 thematic areas. The goal is to help ambitious small to medium sized European cities unleash their potential to use advanced technologies to transform themselves, become more sustainable and raise living standards for their communities.

The ICC will build on the success of the Digital Cities Challenge, which helped 41 EU cities develop a strategic vision and a roadmap for digital transformation. ICC cities will receive high quality and tailored guidance and expert support, access to advisory and city peer networks (European and international), and capability building tools, to drive priority policy goals and the uptake of advanced technologies.

ICLEI as ICC partner supports the consortium to assess the applications of cities to the ICC as well as to manage the project, organise events and provide expertise to the 100 participants.

BELT has the objective to facilitate the transition period of the energy efficiency label (Regulation (EU) 2017/1369) informing and supporting all stakeholders and to reduce to a minimum errors at all levels of the value chain from manufacturer to consumer. Furthermore BELT aims to promote the new label on two key levels: Primarily raising awareness and informing consumers (citizens but also public and business procurement staff) thus allowing them to make better and more informed choices; and secondly helping manufacturers, distributors and retailers to adapt their practices and use the rescaled labels to push innovation in designing energy efficiency products.

Big Buyers for Climate and Environment is a European Commission Initiative for promoting collaboration between big public buyers in implementing strategic public procurement for sustainable solutions. ICLEI and EUROCITIES are currently running the initiative on behalf of the European Commission, DG Internal Market, Industry Entrepreneurship and SMEs (DG GROW). The initiative aims to work together with existing networks and organisations active in this area and is following the successful piloting of three working groups between 2019 and 2020 within the previous Big Buyers Initiative.

Circular PP is a 3-year project supported by the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme. The aim is to address the societal challenge of resource efficiency in a multidimensional way. The project develops an adequate framework for circular procurement in the countries belonging to the Baltic Sea Region.

As major procurers of food and catering services, public authorities can play a strong role in supporting sustainable production and distribution practices in the sector. By carefully integrating the impact of the food they purchase into procurement decisions, public authorities can significantly contribute to supporting environmental improvements in the sector whilst providing a nutritious diet to beneficiaries and supporting targeted producers. However, there is a lack of overview to which extend procurement can have a sustainable influence at which stage of the food value chain. ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability embarks on a new project as part of the UN One Planet Network SPP Programme. The main objective of the project is to provide an overview of procurement along the food value chain and understand how it addresses key hotspots towards shaping the sustainability of food production and consumption.
The ambition is to develop a set of recommendation and case studies written for procurers as well as policy-makers from across the globe, featuring an array of approaches from actors procuring food along the food value chain. In addition, findings and lessons learned will be consolidated in a set of recommendations.

The EU-funded StratKIT project is about making the procurement of public catering services more sustainable. Public authorities have a large purchasing power and have the ability to give clear signals to the market towards green growth and circular economy. However, public procurement is a complex task and good practices in the Baltic Sea region are mostly isolated. StratKIT brings together public authorities, catering service providers and researchers in a network to set up a toolkit and an online open knowledge platform for sustainable public catering.

The project is funded by the the Interreg Baltic See Region Programme.

This project is a three-year EuropeanAid project aiming at improving the lives of workers and those impacted along different stages of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) supply chain through research, campaigning, capacity building and advocacy.

The Big Public Buyers Initiative is as a platform for promoting and enabling collaboration between big public buyers on strategic public procurement to help drive the market for innovative goods and services. The main aim of the initiative is to enhance the uptake of strategic public procurement in Europe through partnerships with public buyers. Three working groups will be established, each involving at least three public buyers, focusing on a specific product/sector, where there is a shared public need not sufficiently provided by the current market. The working groups will deliver a tangible outcome such as the development of common procurement standards, the launching of a joint statement of demand, or a joint procurement exercise. ICLEI is running the initiative together with EUROCITIES on behalf of DG Grow.

INNOPATHS is a four year EU funded research project that aims to work with key economic and societal actors to generate new, state-of-the-art low-carbon pathways for the European Union.

The main objective of this project is to establish an Innovation Procurement Broker (IPB) that brings together and facilitates the procurement of innovative goods and services between contracting authorities, suppliers of innovation (with a special focus on SMEs and start-ups), investors, and researchers. This sustainable business model is based on scaling up the activities of 5 pilot schemes at European level. The pilots are implemented at regional and national level testing out different approaches.

Within CIVITAS ECCENTRIC, the cities of Madrid, Stockholm, Munich, Turku and Ruse are working together to tackle the challenges of mobility in suburban districts and clean, silent and CO2 free city logistics. CIVITAS ECCENTRIC demonstrates the potential and replicability of integrated and inclusive urban planning approaches, innovative policies and emerging technologies in five “Living Lab” areas. Clean vehicles and fuels are tested, new regulations and services formulated and consolidation solutions developed in close partnership with the private sector.

UrbanWINS aims to develop and test methods for designing and implementing strategic plans for waste prevention and management. Cities involved will enhance urban environmental resilience and shift towards sustainable production and consumption.

BuyZET is a partnership of cities aiming to achieve zero emission urban delivery of goods and services by developing innovative procurement plans.

GrowSmarter brings together cities and industry to integrate and demonstrate ‘12 smart city solutions’ in energy, infrastructure and transport, to provide other cities with valuable insights on how they work in practice and opportunities for replication. The cities of Stockholm, Cologne and Barcelona are implementing solutions ranging from smart home energy management systems, to micro-freight distribution; from automated waste collection, to vehicle to grid charging.

Environmental NGOs have knowledge and experience with many of the environmental issues addressed by GPP criteria, such as hazardous substances, waste management, energy efficiency etc, and therefore represent vital stakeholders when promoting GPP. The objective of the NGO Network is to increase the uptake of GPP through the EU by building NGO capacity to support public authorities.

To increase the uptake of LCC considerations in tenders throughout the European Union, the European Commission would like to provide practitioners with harmonised, widely agreed LCC methodologies and tools and has published the present call for tenders. Ecoinstitut SCCL in a joint tender together with ICLEI (and relevant subcontractors) will work on LCC tools in 2018 and 2019. A public consultation on the tool(s) is carried out in cooperation with the Procura+ European Sustainable Procurement Network Interest Group on LCC.

ICLEI is developing an updated version of the EU Commission's Buying Social - a Guide on taking account of social considerations in public procurement

SPP Regions focused on building and strengthening regional sustainable procurement networks around Copenhagen (Denmark), Rotterdam - The Hague (Netherlands), Turin (Italy), Bristol (UK), Barcelona (Spain), West France and Gabrovo (Bulgaria).

InnProBio aims to stimulate demand for bio-based products and services in Europe. The project will increase the number of public procurers equipped to carry out the procurement of innovative bio-based products and services.

Birmingham (UK), Budapest (Hungary), Castelló & Valencia (Spain) and Wrocław (Poland) will demonstrate that by selectively intervening in scheduled public tenders, energy consumption can be reduced and GHG emissions decreased.

GreenS works with local energy agencies to create and consolidate permanent supporting structures to provide public authorities with long-term support and technical assistance in the process of GPP preparation and implementation.

PPI4Waste aims to find innovative solutions to key needs identified by procurers. This will help promote efficient management of municipal waste and support the implementation of European policies and national strategies on waste.

The project brings together ten partners from five EU Member States to establish the conditions for health institutions throughout Europe to collaborate in the purchase of innovative health products, services and solutions to promote "ageing well".

GPP 2020 aims to mainstream low-carbon procurement across Europe in support of the EU’s goal of a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, a 20% increase in the share of renewable energy and a 20% increase in energy efficiency by 2020.

PRIMES works to build capacity for GPP within small and medium-sized public sector organisations, provide hands-on support for implementation and act as an agent of change for GPP at the regional and local level in all EU Member States.

PROBIS aims to use PPI in the building sector, with a focus on energy-efficient refurbishment of existing buildings. Four tenders will be launched on building technologies (ICT, envelope and energy equipment) before being tested in four pilot buildings in Torino (IT), Miskolc (HU), Börlange (SE) and in the Lombardy Region (IT).

The objective of iNSPiRe is to tackle the problem of high-energy consumption by producing systemic renovation packages that can be applied to residential and tertiary buildings. The renovation packages developed by iNSPiRe aim to reduce the primary energy consumption of a building to lower than 50 kWh/m2/year. The packages need to be suitable to a variety of climates while ensuring optimum comfort for the building users.

INNOCAT aims to bring together a group of public and private buyers to publish a series of tenders for eco-innovative catering products, services and solutions. The aim is to help encourage eco-innovation in the catering sector by providing a sizeable launch market for new solutions.

ENIGMA is a FP7 project that aims to implement a joint transnational pre-commercial procurement (PCP) procedure in the field of public lighting. Coordinated by the city of Eindhoven, the project’s 5 partner municipalities (Eindhoven, Malmo, Stavanger, Espoo and Bassano del Grappa) cooperate on procuring innovation and testing in a real-life environment the technologies that their commercial subcontractors develop.

The Clean Fleets project assists public authorities and fleet operators with the implementation of the Clean Vehicles Directive and the procurement or leasing of clean and energy-efficient vehicles. It offers a helpdesk, discussion forum and a range of supporting tools and publications, which can be found by visiting:

The LANDMARK project was about enabling European local authorities to act as key drivers for the promotion of fair and decent working conditions in global supply chains for certain products purchased by the European public sector in order to help to improve the living and working conditions of workers in Asia and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa particularly in the textiles, food, construction and electronics sectors.

The STA project aims to provide guidance for public authorities on how to procure sustainable and fairly traded timber. It will also develop a dual model for timber suppliers on how to integrate fair trade and sustainable forest management certification.

Topten is a consumer-oriented online search tool, which presents the best appliances in various categories of products. The key criteria are energy efficiency, impact on the environment, health and quality.

The SCI-Network connects public authorities looking to procure innovative and sustainable solutions within their construction projects. The SCI-Network aims to: jointly identify new construction solutions, and examine how best to encourage innovation in construction procurement.

SMART SPP promoted the introduction onto the market of innovative highly energy efficient technologies in the last stages of development. This was done by encouraging early market engagement between public authority procurers and suppliers in the pre-procurement phase, including the issue of tenders.

The overall goal of this project was to collect evidence on the economic and administrative costs and benefits of GPP versus procurement of non-green (or conventional) products by national governments and individual purchasing authorities.

The research project, RELIEF, explored the environmental relief potential of green public procurement in the European Union. The RELIEF results have formed the basis for the development of the Sustainable Procurement Campaign, Procura+.

The SIPTRAM project aimed to encourage local and regional authorities across Europe to improve the environmental and social standards in urban public transport through the competitive tendering process.