Trucost – Carbon foot print of London's Local Authority Procurement

Capital Ambition has funded a groundbreaking project that has identified how to reduce the carbon footprint of London’s £8 billion public procurement.

The three year project, delivered by Trucost has evaluated 90% of suppliers to London local authorities, a total of over 9,000 suppliers.  Information for the research has been made available through Capital Ambition’s Online Expenditure Analysis which provides a facility for London Boroughs to analyse their spend and compare spending with other authorities. 

29 London Borough Councils, the GLA, City of London and London’s Fire and Emergency Planning Authority have taken part in this project and have been provided with reports that detail their spend, their most carbon-intensive suppliers and provides a modelling tool specific to the authority to that details how changes to carbon use in suppliers will impact their overall supply-chain carbon use.

Trucost has developed a comprehensive approach to calculating quantitative environmental impacts across organisations, supply chains and investment portfolios. Trucost has analysed the environmental performance of more than 4,500 companies worldwide. Corporate impacts are initially calculated using Trucost’s advanced environmental profiling model which calculates more than 700 environmental impacts, including GHG emissions, water abstraction, air pollutants and heavy metals, from 464 industries worldwide and categorises authority spend into ‘pro-class’ categories.  

The research report identifies 8 main recommendations for London’s local authorities:

• Forecast likely ROI on Carbon Reduction Strategies
• Baseline from which to set future targets
• Interogate the data to focus on most intensive sectors
• Raise supplier awareness of variation in sector performance & highlight improvement opportunities
• Negotiate carbon intensity improvement using knowledge of sector variation
• Focus on carbon intensity ‘hotspots’
• Encourage suppliers to disclose, manage & cut carbon
• Cooperate and use market share to cut emmissions