Open Risk Academy

In a new and free online game we introduce some aspects of Green Public Procurement in a simplified, fun setting that helps highlight some of the considerations involved.

In the game the player assumes the role of a public procurement manager working for a large city. The gameplay imagines our intrepid public servant (namely, you!) inheriting a challenging procurement portfolio that has a substantial environmental footprint (in terms of excess Greenhouse gas emissions). The general objective is to use the next procurement season to reduce the city’s environmental impact by making optimal choices when various procurement tenders materialize.

More background about the game (more extended instructions and glossaries) are provided in a new Open Risk Academy course.

Enjoy!

Sustainable Public Procurement involves significant complexity and implementation barriers as it involves diverse categories of products and services, each with their own specific sustainability and knowledge requirements. It also requires augmented organizational capacities to handle expanded information flows that provide more holistic views on market capabilities and supply chain inter-dependencies.

In this post we want to review and discuss potential applications of Kraljic methodologies specifically in the context of Green Public Procurement, and even more specifically addressing the GHG emissions footprint of public procurement activities.

Europe's updated economic activity classification scheme (NACE Rev 2.1 - 2025) is now documented at the Open Risk Manual, with the myriad inclusions / exclusions accessible via hyperlinks.

The old classification continues to be accessible as it will be relevant for some time during the transition period. The entries of the new classification include references to the old one (which sometimes is not 1:1).

Summary

Public Procurement represents a major opportunity to catalyze the transition of economies towards more sustainable patterns but faces important challenges. 

In this new White Paper we review mechanisms that can help address key pain points through the use of open standards, open data and open source tools. In the first part we frame the overall task of Sustainable Public Procurement as an instance of portfolio management.

We outline three distinct information processing pillars that are relevant in this context. We focus here on the task of measuring and attributing greenhouse gas emissions to an existing procurement portfolio.

Structure of the paper:

• In the first section we review relevant background material. In particular we go into the measurement of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions as the essential new information in GPP context.
• In the second section we discuss Sustainable Portfolio Management as an integrated practice, outline the main activities involved and their information technical requirements.
• In the third section we discuss the basics of GHG accounting as they apply in a local government procurement context. This involves the attribution of emissions to procurement contracts on an individual and then portfolio basis. Our focus is highlighting what are informative portfolio views. We discuss the attribution of direct emissions and the challenge of attributing indirect emissions. We discuss standard GHG accounting (inventory) approaches of measuring direct emissions as exemplified e.g., by the IPCC methodologies.
• In the fourth and final section we highlight interesting and relevant open data standards and open source projects in the evolving landscape of tools that can facilitate the implementation of sustainable procurement.

In this new blog post we discuss the proliferation of indices and metrics for computing concentration risk (and related diversification and inequality indices).

We go over the underlying reasons for such proliferation.

• Reason 1: Invented separately in many distinct domains
• Reason 2: Multiple names for essentially the same Index
• Reason 3: Generalized Families of Indexes
• Reason 4: The nature of the underlying data
• Reason 5: Distinct meaning and usability

In this post we elaborate on the insights we can derive when using well established Environmentally-Extended Input-Output frameworks in a slightly different manner: as the canvas for monetary random walks following the money.