You should consider including climate selection criteria in your procurement exercise that will result in carbon reduction. This could be done by including climate selection criteria into your Single Procurement Document (SPD) in question 4C7.
Your selection criteria must be proportionate and considered for all relevant contracts or priority contracts.
The Sustainable Procurement Tools Platform contains tools and guidance to help you decide when it is relevant to include climate criteria in your procurement exercise.
The Sustainability Test is a self-assessment tool designed to help buyers embed relevant and proportionate sustainability requirements consistently in the development of contracts and frameworks. The results of the Sustainability Test will identify if the contract is relevant and if the buyer should therefore address climate considerations at this stage of the procurement.
Priority contracts are:
If the procurement is a relevant or priority climate change contract you must state this in your Contract Notice. More information is provided below in the Climate Change Plan section
Quickfire Guide
You should ensure that any minimum standards are proportionate to the contract and are not overly onerous.
For example if you require BS EN ISO 14001 you should accept any accredited independent third party certificate of compliance in accordance with the relevant criteria. You should also accept other examples of equivalent measures provided that the bidder proves that the proposed measures comply with the required standards e.g. documented environmental management policies and procedures.
Further help in setting these standards can be found in the standardised statements.
When setting your climate selection criteria, you may wish to consider key themes from your organisation’s Climate Change Strategy.
For example the Scottish Government Climate Change Plan includes the following priority areas: buildings, transport, waste, electricity, agriculture, Land Use Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF), and industry.
The Sustainable Procurement Tools Platform contains:
Climate Change Guidance documents Climate Change Adaptation, Carbon in Production and Climate and Energy hosted on the Sustainable Procurement Tools each include an annex of example procurement clauses and KPIs relating to climate that you could also ask of bidder, some other examples can be found in the table below:
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Example responses |
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What practical steps/activities and changes your organisation can make to what you do now |
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The objectives/outcomes expected from your activities |
Reduce the use of single use plastics by X % |
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The timelines involved with these activities |
Set milestones for reduction with complete elimination by X |
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How you will monitor and evidence the changes and impact your organisation can/will make |
Review PO’s raised and the number of times used |
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New opportunities. |
Add new products/do something differently whist reducing carbon emissions |
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How you can contribute to what we buy, making sure that this is low carbon through the supply chain?
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Provide a new way of delivering goods or services, such as ‘product as a service’ to keep or maximise the use of products and keep materials in use for as long as possible |
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How you can make a difference to our climate change aspirations?
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Provide goods or services that result in carbon emissions reduction in public sector workplaces |
Please note: all selection criteria must be relevant and proportionate to the procurement exercise.
More examples (on Climate Change Adaptation, Carbon in Production and Climate and Energy) can be found in the Climate Change Guidance documents. These include an annex of example procurement clauses and KPIs relating to climate.
If you have identified that your procurement exercise is a relevant and/or priority contract you may ask bidders to include a Bidder Climate Change Plan Template in at your selection stage.
The Bidder ‘priority contract’ Climate Change Plan Template asks bidders to supply:
The Bidder ‘relevant contract’ Climate Change Plan Template asks bidders to supply:
As you can see from the above, the Bidder ‘relevant contract’ Climate Change Plan Template asks bidders to supply information on their organisation’s emissions sources, but does not currently ask bidders to calculate their carbon emissions. This plan also requires bidders to supply the actions the bidder is taking to address their organisation’s carbon emissions.
Quickfire Guide
Carbon emissions are classified as Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, as defined in the Greenhouse Gas Protocol:
Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions arising from owned or controlled sources e.g. owned vehicles, combustion of fuel in facilities
Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions from purchased energy e.g. electricity, heating, cooling
Scope 3 emissions are all other indirect emissions that occur in the organisation’s value chain e.g. purchased goods and services, waste, business travel, staff commuting, water
Where bidders are required to provide a climate change plan, this should be included in the Contract Notice at II.2.14 Additional Information.
You must attach the appropriate Bidder Climate Change Plan Template to the Contract Notice. Blank Relevant and Priority Bidder Climate Change Plan Templates are included below as well as completed examples for several sectors.
Guidance for buyers on evaluating templates is found on the Sustainable Procurement Tools.
Different plans are required for relevant and priority contracts. Blank Relevant and Priority Bidder Climate Change Plan Templates are included below as well as completed examples for several sectors.
Guidance for buyers on evaluating templates is found on the Climate Change Guidance page of the Sustainable Procurement Tools
Note that the Bidder ‘priority contract’ Climate Change Plan Template may be updated in the future as this will be reviewed on a bi-annual basis. Any changes made will be communicated.
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More information on timing and milestones can be found in Climate Timescales.